Is the pulse technology real? Well, it was real enough in a military
application in World War II. 2,420 V-1 Buzz Bombs hit the city
of London, killing 5684 people and destroying 24,492 buildings.
The V-1 was powered by an Argus Rohr pulsejet engine. I spoke
to Ron Holland at the test on February 10. He was very forthcoming
on the pulse technology. When I asked about how it worked, his
question to me was, "Are you familiar with pulsejets?" I looked
at my friend and he looked back at me and grinned." I told Mr.
Holland about our research into pulsejet engines, and the discussion
went on from there into enough details to figure out what BAT
has done. I have copies of patents obtained by a Mr. Frank Lockwood detailing a valveless pulsejet. I did mathematical studies
in 1993 aimed at constructing one. My conclusion was that the
valveless pulsejet was very poor in specific fuel consumption and
I said that to Mr. Holland. He replied that the reason for the poor
fuel consumption was that the pulsejet did not compress the mixture.
l knew at that point we were on the same wavelength. Holland
said that Argus Rohr still had patents on the pulsejet technology.
Pulse charging has been applied to off road vehicles in the 1970's.
I owned four of them myself. The principle is applicable to two stroke
and four stroke engines. They can be optimized for economy or
power or some intermediate combination. In the four stroke engine
the important factors are intake and exhaust system lengths, the opening of the exhaust valve and the closing of the intake valve,
and the compression ratio of the engine. I have worked with valve
timing and compression ratios in modifying a four stroke gasoline
engine up to 30% more power myself. I know what approximate
camshaft lobe centers work with different numbers of cylinders on
gasoline engines. I do not know what the lobe centers would be
on a diesel engine. Lobe center simply refers to the point where a
valve is fully open in comparison to the crankshaft position, and
it is a way to work backwards to the valve opening or closing event,
which is critical to work with the lengths of the intake and exhaust
systems and the compression ratio. For instance, I would set a
Chevy V-8's lobe centers about 112 to 114 degrees after top dead
center on the power stroke. If I was working with a four cylinder,
my lobe centers would be about 104 to 107 degrees. All of this
is available in the media. But BAT would like to keep their lobe
centers and valve lifts as "proprietary information" and I agree with
that. If I walked up to Kerry Andrew, a well known motorcycle tuner,
and said "Kerry, what lobe centers should I use on my 1998 GSXR?",
Kerry would not tell me. He would say, "That's a gray area. Proprietary
information, you see. Bring it over and I will set the cams for you."
Then I could take my bike home, check the lobe centers, and
charge my racer friends for degreeing their cams to Kerry Andrew's
specs. But would Kerry do for me exactly what he does for his own winning machines? I doubt it. So, is this proprietary information patentable? I doubt that too, but I am not a patent attorney. BAT doesn't need to convince the U.S. Patent Ofiice that they have discovered anything new. It could be that all previous pulse tuning patents have expired. How long can proprietary information be kept
secret? Well, BAT's IP is not exactly the Coca Cola formula, kept
locked away in a safe somewhere. It would be completely open
to reverse engineering. |
