Over the past few months the Dynamo Team has been working on deploying our first generation TurboCore 700, a turbine engine platform for the next generation of remote power products. Our platform is designed for three things: reliability, flexibility, and modularity. There are several ways to interface with our platform, from our software & controls API to interfacing with the physical hardware of our product—and we’ll be working to make this as seamless for designers as possible.
The reason we are doing this is simple. With all of the resources and talent of the world at our disposal, we know that there are experts out there who know far more about their customers’ needs than we will, and we want to empower them to leverage our product. Every week we get a request for adapting our hardware for specific application, including water desalination, flameless heat, & residential combined heat and power. While we wish we could tackle all these problems, we can’t. As turbine experts, we can teach you to push the envelope of imagination with our products.
At Dynamo we are working on developing a world class turbine platform. We are focusing our in-house design efforts on a unique generator solution built around this technology; we also provide these components as kits for our development partners. But at the core of the platform is our gas generator—it’s the heart of the engine that drives the performance & flexibility of the unit. The gas generator is designed to run across a broad range of environmental conditions, with a wide range of fuels, and to do so reliably for thousands of hours—allowing end users the freedom to employ the turbine when and where they need it. The turbomachinery is interchangeable, allowing us to provide different gas generators sized for specific applications, at a cost that is comparable to traditional reciprocating engines found in the market today.
The gas generator alone only produces hot, pressurized air, and additional components are needed to put it to work—such as the addition of heat exchangers, generator, auxiliary turbines. We do these ourselves in building our generator product. To facilitate the mechanical design, we offer a Hardware Development Kit, which contains everything from CAD models, drawings, specs, and reference designs for products we have worked on.
Adding components to an engine will affect its performance, and we realize that it may be difficult for those without a turbo-machinery background to understand the effects. To make it easier to work with the TurboCore platform, we offer training and certification programs that teach you how to integrate this unique engine in a variety of products. In some respects, providing this information is a double edged sword. We are describing to potential competitors how we engineer and build our products, and we are giving away a wealth of applications we could build ourselves, but we taking on this risk both get our technology to those who need it and to motivate ourselves to continue to provide higher performance & more innovative turbines.
Beyond the hardware platform, we also offer a software platform and API, which allows end users to interface directly with our control system. We build the control system to ensure that the engine can be started and operated reliably and safely; this is no trivial task, considering the broad range of fuels we expect to use, and the broad range of environments we will have to operate in. However, our goal is to also provide end users with the ability to configure and operate the device as they see fit. We are still working on making this system more robust, and anticipate releasing an API in a year.
This is our brief plan on getting TurboCores into as many hands as possible, and we are hoping those of you who have the will and the imagination can work with us to bring this game changing technology to the marketplace. To demonstrate this approach, the next post will describe a reference design we put together over the summer for a customer.