EV market growth is beginning to slow. 
    Recently the world's media started covering the decline in EV sales and the many reasons it's happening.   Tesla sales continue to drop in several markets, and the company has lost half a trillion USD in value.  But, Tesla is not alone, every EV maker has seen their market share and their stock price collapse. The sector has laid off or fired thousands of employees, including many top executives. Even in China it has been reported that 93% of their EV makers are about to go bankrupt and the country is littered with thousands of unsold EV's.  Note: Red texts are web links.  

Governments now think tax subsidies for EVs are a bad investment.
    In the face of waning market demand China and Europe have started pulling back on tax subsidies for EVs, and it looks like America will follow!  Several recent studies have revealed that about half of EV owners are returning to petrol-fueled cars. These events have prompted much of the auto sector to scrap its EV plans.

EVs could be more refined.
     EV drive systems and performance have become very refined.  But, range anxiety and charging time trauma they cause could use a lot more refining. The fact that EVs haul around a half tonne or more of batteries which contain less energy than just 15 kg of fuel, is clearly an area that needs a second look, and more refinement.  This weight makes EVs handle like an overloaded truck, and worse causes them to take up to 20 meters farther to stop in an emergency.  Is this why EV drivers are more often at fault when they hit another car?  Another area where EVs could use some refinement is their source of energy.  The world grid has more than 4,400 coal or fossil-fueled steam engines powering it.  This 19th-century technology emits millions of tons of toxic gasses containing particles of arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, manganese, nickel, radium, and selenium.  Even hydroelectric emits three billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year.   There are so many reasons for the growing resistance to EVs.  

Kamtech RE can bring refinement and solutions to all these issues,
and conserve the resource that has lifted billions of people out of poverty, fossil fuels. 

The history of Cam engines   
    The concept of moving pistons with a cam rather than a crank has a long history. The first certified aircraft engine was a radial cam engine, the Caminez engine developed by a Fairchild company.  Yes, the same innovative guy who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, and developer of the first computer chip in the late 1950s.  Clearly, this forward thinking guy thought the concept had merit.  But in 1927 it was not possible to machine close tolerance cams, and this prevented the refinement of the concept.  Today, CNC machining has solved that problem.  The proof is found in our highly efficient Rad Cam engine.  

Balancing the combustion/piston dynamic
     In 1982 Professor Antoni Oppenheim, of the University of California coauthored an SAE paper with J. Douglas Dale University of Alberta entitled "A Rationale for Advances in the Technology of IC Engines, (SAE #820047)  The underlying message of the paper was that the dynamics of combustion and a crank-driven piston are out of sync. The paper was a call to engine makers to develop an engine with combustion chambers with a volumetric expansion dynamic that was more in sync with the combustion event.   Professor Oppenheim also published the books  "The Dynamics of Combustion" and "Combustion in Piston Engines".  He suggested that the most suitable engine for realizing an ideal IC engine is a direct-injected two-stroke engine.  The end goal was to design and build an engine that would control combustion so that far more of its thermal energy was transformed into work.

Who Will Take Up The Challenge?
   In the early 1990s, Professor Oppenheim explained the challenge to his friend, Jim Duncalf, who owned an engineering firm in Fremont, California. Duncalf had spent five years on the speaker's bureau of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and had a background in energy conservation.   Duncalf agreed to the challenge, but only under Professor Oppenheim's direction.
  
 

     2. Most p-V diagrams show the power stroke as an “adiabatic process”.  Which implies heat loss from the working fluid, the air/fuel charge (A/F).  But, that too just ain’t so.  If the heat of combustion did not make the engine hot it would collide with the second law of thermodynamics, which in its most understandable wording states “Heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter.” If none of the heat of combustion went into the engine parts there would be no need for a cooling system and more of the heat’s energy could be converted into work.  Professor Oppenheim correctly points out that heat loss to a cooling system could be vastly reduced with more suitable materials than aluminum which needs to be cooled to just over 200 C, or it loses its strength.   The combustion chambers of traditional IC engines have to contain a flame front which is over 2.000 C, but aluminum melts at just 660 C, so a massive cooling system is needed so ​chamber parts ​aren't damaged.

    Thankfully aluminum is good at moving heat into the cooling medium because it has a thermal conductivity of 237 W/m K.   We found a better material, 304 stainless steel, which has a working temperature of over 700 C and a thermal conductivity of just 16.2 W/m-K, which is 15 times more insulative than aluminum.  It's like putting on that insulated jacket to slow your heat loss.  
    
Another advantage of 304 SS is its ability to endure temperatures hot enough so that carbon will not condense on it and it is very reflective of radian heat.  Another nice advantage of 304 is the combustion temperature if HCCI is used is only about 600 C, not a problem for 304 liners.  This lower temperature of combustion also eliminates the danger of igniting the nitrogen into NOx.  

​Our piston design consists of a ​frame and ​top of 304 SS and the skirt is made of ​graphite which ​does a good job of conduction cooling of ​the SS sleeve and has very low friction.  Other details are proprietary. 

 Find a problem you care about and develop a product to solve it.
   After all the bench and flight testing Mark Bierele was trying to set up a production line for his design, and Jim Duncalf was looking for more companies to license the concept to.  In the fall of 2006 Duncalf and his brother went to the San Francisco Auto Show.  There they met a Martin Eberhard at a booth of a new company called Tesla.  Martin and his partner Marc Tarpenning had electrified a lightweight British sports car called the Lotus Elise. They bought the drive train from another small company Tzero and powered the drive train with lithium-ion batteries, the same cells that power laptop computers, only this prototype had 400 kg of them. 

    After a little small talk, Martin explained a they were hoping to lower the weight, lengthen its range, and shorten its charging time.  This looked like the perfect application for an engine that could produce a kWh of power with less CO2 than the electric grid.  After a short discussion, about the potential of replacing a few hundred kg with the Rad Cam, powered generator they agreed to meet for further discussion on working together.

   But Duncalf's attempts to follow up failed.  Tesla's two founders and their first large investor, Elon Musk were having lots of friction.  Musk had allied with the owners of the world's electric grid as well donating millions to politicians who are in a position to give him tax-supported subsidies.   This precluded any chance of Tesla embracing the Rad Cam technology.  We were shut out and a few years later Musk removed the two founders of Tesla.  This is even though these two founders had led the design of virtually all of Tesla's cars except for the Cyber Truck.  

Musk's alliances proved beneficial as billions of dollars of government monies have been granted to his companies in both the US and China.  Tesla was even sold an entire auto plant for 42 million on land that was estimated to be worth 3-4 billion.  Musk quickly became the richest man in the world because of his ownership of taxpayer-funded companies. 

A few months after this visit with one of Tesla's founders Duncalf and Bierele found themselves being fined for not being compliant with the planned phaseout of all IC engines.  This put the development of the Rad Cam engine on hold for several years. Hopefully, wiser heads will soon prevail.  The world can survive a little more CO2, which is the foundation of all life on earth, however, the toxic emissions pumped into the air by the 4500 large fossil-fueled electric plants are another story. 

As outlined above in the early 1990s UC Berkeley Professor Antony K. Oppenheim, offered to assist mechanical engineer Jim Duncalf who owned a small engineering firm, Advance Machine Technologies in designing a more efficient internal combustion engine based on cam-actuated pistons.

    To help solve some of the project's many mechanical issues, Duncalf consulted with the famous retired mechanic Smokey Yunic.  Once the mechanics of the cam system were proven to be sufficiently robust the team was joined by engineer Mark Beierle of Earth Star Aircraft Company.  Mark was responsible for several design changes and built and tested three fully operational prototypes.  Many years later Duncalf moved to Vietnam and eventually was joined by Pham Duy Tung to assist in building the last prototype and design the final RE design.   The sixth prototype was to test the most recent design changes and new materials.  This test prototype was built in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Kamtech SA is a dba of the two remaining principals.

    The current design has also had significant design input from Professor Huynh Thanh Cong, who teaches Internal Combustion Engine technology, at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology.