Infield Capital

Pinnacle 4-stroke opposed-piston SI engine shows fuel economy improvements of between 30-60% at light loads, 12-30% at medium loads over conventional

amy — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:27:16 +0000

April 24, 2012, Green Car Congress – Pinnacle Engines, the developer of a high compression ratio, four-stroke, spark-ignited (SI), opposed-piston, sleeve-valve architecture engine (earlier post) reports that the most basic configuration of its engine has shown improvements in indicated specific fuel consumption (ISFC) of between 30-60% at light load and 12-30% at medium-load compared to a comparably sized conventional poppet-valve technology engine. There is no ISFC improvement at high load.

The results represent a light-load indicated efficiency improvement of 15-30% (up to 40.9%). The company presented these latest test results in a paper at the SAE 2012 World Congress in Detroit.

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Pinnacle, FEV developing opposed-piston engine for emerging markets

amy — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:51:55 +0000

April 19, 2012, Automotive Engineering International Online – Pinnacle Engines has developed an ultra-efficient engine design based on a four-stroke, spark-ignited (SI), opposed-piston, sleeve-valve architecture using conventional engine manufacturing technology. The company says that the architecture, developed in-house in conjunction with FEV, incorporates two old efficiency ideas into one package, improving both in the process.

Opposed-piston engines have been around for quite some time in two-stroke form but suffer from an emissions perspective. Sleeve-valve engines had some decided advantages in knock resistance and power density, but they too had emissions-related challenges due to the sleeves’ lubrication circuit.

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Green Garage: An eco-friendly service shop for cars

amy — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:00:48 +0000

April 16, 2012, CNN Start Small Think Big - Reynolds Wolf gives us a tour of a new garage that could have you and your car running greener.

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Aspirations in Colorado to Be a New Motor City

amy — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:29:56 +0000

December 16, 2011, New York Times – IN the world of computers, Silicon Valley is recognized as the spawning ground of technology start-ups. For financial institutions, Lower Manhattan has long been the place to set up shop.

And of course Detroit has historically served as the epicenter of American automaking, evolving in recent times from a manufacturing center to a headquarters city. Still, there is no guaranty that its dominance is permanent.

Among the places vying to become a nexus of automotive development is this college town of 140,000 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, some 1,300 miles from the Motor City. Already it has earned a reputation as one of the country’s leading engine and transportation research centers, digging into the dirty business of civilizing some of the industry’s biggest and least sophisticated engines.

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Pinnacle engine: Two pistons, one explosion

amy — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:57:16 +0000

December 15, 2011, CNET Reviews – Over the roar from a 110-cc, two-cylinder engine, Pinnacle Engines founder James Cleeves (nicknamed Monty), pointed out a window in the block.

“You can see the cylinder sleeve moving for the intake stroke,” he yelled over the din. Mostly what I could see was oil bubbling in the tiny window, hidden behind the spinning bands driving the camshafts. On the other side of the block was a bigger belt, joining the engine’s two crankshafts and spinning at 4,000rpm, the current test speed. The safety glasses I was issued on entering the test room would be little help if the belt snapped.

This was the engine test cell at Pinnacle Engines in San Carlos, Calif., a soundproofed room containing the most recent prototype of this innovative new engine design. The engine sat on a test stand, hooked up to sensors monitoring every aspect of its operation, from torque output to emissions.

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EV Technology Company Mission Motors Powers Growth

amy — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:27:59 +0000

November 8, 2011, TriplePundit.com – It’s been a fantastic year for electric vehicle technology company, Mission Motors. In July this year, the company’s electric racing bike, the Mission R, (at right) won the TTXGP at Laguna Seca by a sizable margin; show-casing their technology against a competitive field of other EV motorcycle developers, while demonstrating comparable performance with gasoline-powered racing bikes.

Subsequent to their success on the track, the bike went on to win a Core 77 design award, recognizing the Mission R for both its cutting-edge industrial design and execution, as well as helping to make electric vehicles exciting and aspirational.

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Lithium: The New California Gold Rush

amy — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:03:42 +0000

October 19, 2011, Forbes - Standing on the edge of the Salton Sea in southern California’s sun-blasted Imperial Valley, Luka Erceg surveys a Mad Max landscape—head-high mud volcanoes, hulking geothermal power plants shooting steam into a pale-blue sky and the rotting corpses of tilapia, mouths agape, stranded on a saline shore that sits 227 feet below sea level. The air is heavy with a pungent mix of sulfur, salt and dead fish.

Smells like money.

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Pinnacle Looks Beyond Detroit as the Market for Its Opposed-Piston Engine

amy — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:19:20 +0000

October 4, 2011, Xconomy.com - When Ecomotors International set out to change the way car and truck engines are built, it set up shop in Livonia, MI, a suburb of Detroit, in hopes of eventually licensing its technology to the big U.S. automakers. It was a calculated risk. As radical as Ecomotors’ opposed-piston engine design may be, at least the company’s founder, Peter Hofbauer, has unquestionable auto-industry credentials—he’s the guy who helped Volkswagen build its first mass-production diesel engine.

Pinnacle Engines isn’t even bothering with Detroit. The San Carlos, CA, startup, which recently won the backing of the world’s largest venture capital firm, is also developing an opposed-piston engine, one that promises to marry the fuel efficiency of diesel technology with the lower cost structure of gasoline-burning engines. But Pinnacle’s founder, James Montague “Monty” Cleeves, is a veteran of the semiconductor industry; for him, designing engines and tinkering with cars was always an avocation, not a profession. He’s pretty convinced that Detroit will never listen to his ideas—so Pinnacle is looking farther east for its first commercialization opportunities. Much farther east. To India, in fact.

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Start-Up in California Plans to Capture Lithium, and Market Share

amy — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:20:43 +0000

September 28, 2011, New York Times - A start-up company will announce on Wednesday that it is beginning commercial operations at a factory in Southern California to capture lithium from existing geothermal energy plants, a technology it says has the potential to turn the United States into a major lithium exporter.

The plant, built by Simbol Materials near the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley, will also capture manganese and zinc.

None of the materials that Simbol plans to produce are so-called rare earths, but a study by the American Physical Society in February identified lithium and zinc as likely to be very important in the new energy economy of the future. The society considers them “energy critical elements.”

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Prospects for Overhaul of Combustion Engine

amy — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:33:47 +0000

September 21, 2011, Bloomberg - Rohini Chakravarthy, partner at NEA, a venture capital fund, talks about the outlook for overhauling the combustion engine. She speaks with Carol Massar on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart.”

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