The history of Cam engines The concept of moving pistons with a cam rather than a crank has a
long history. The first aircraft engine of any type to be certified for flight by the United States Navy was a
radial cam engine, the Caminez engine developed by the Fairchild Group of Companies. Yes, the same innovative guy who
founded
Fairchild Semiconductor, which developed the first computer chip in the late 1950s and spawned California's Silicon Valley. This forward-thinking entrepreneur 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, Computer Numerical Control or
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, Donald James (
Jim) Duncalf, who owned an engineering firm in Fremont, California. Duncalf has long been an advocate of conserving energy, and in the 1970s, he designed and built several energy-saving passive and active solar buildings. The first was built in 1972 and sponsored by the Johns Manville Company. He later spent four years on the speaker's bureau of what became the Illinois
Environmental Protection Agency and has a long background in energy conservation. Duncalf agreed to the challenge, but only under Professor Oppenheim's direction.
He later enlisted one of his long time heros the knowledgable engine expert Smokey Yunick, It has not been easy, but with the help and technical input of many people, The Rad Cam engine was first developed into an Aircraft engine in 2005, and now design work has been finished on Kamtech's "On Board Energy" source for EVs.