Among the 12 winning technologies selected from over 100 internationally sourced entries at the recent Cummins Environmental Gateway Competition, Cambridge SME Epicam will submit for trialling at a Cummins (UK) facility, a generating system driven by wind and having an integrated energy storage and power regeneration system.
The energy is stored in the form of liquid air which is produced from a compact air liquefaction unit driven directly by the wind turbine. This enables the novel wind machine to store surplus energy under good wind conditions and re-generate power for delivery in the absence of wind, thus providing continuous power regardless of wind conditions.
At the core of the technology developed by Epicam is a pair of rotors, one lobed and the other with pockets which counter-rotate together so that lobes and pockets interact in a unique manner without actual contact rotor to rotor or with their housing so as to provide either compression or expansion in compressible fluids like air without internal friction from mechanical contact. These rotor pairs are used in a sequence of compression and expansion stages to compress air, remove the heat of compression and then expand it to produce cooling, which ultimately results in driving the temperature of the air below its condensation point and enables it to be stored as liquid air. The same type of rotors are used as an expansion engine to convert the pressure released from the liquid air when it is warmed to atmospheric temperature by local air. The engine operates at speeds up to 20,000 RPM driving a high-speed generator and demonstrating a power density several times greater than todays’ best internal combustion engines.
Epicam believes that this technology will form the basis of the next generation of industrial, domestic and transport power delivery based upon the phase change in air in much the same way as the railway era came about as a result of the discovery of utilising the energy from the same phase change from liquid to gas in water.
Tony Dye, Senior Member of Wolfson College Cambridge and Managing Director of Epicam, comments: “We saw the contract alert from Cambridge Cleantech, entered the competition and have come out as winners, which we are delighted about. I will be working closely with Cummins to start trials soon”.
Denis Ford - International Sourcing Leader EMEA, NE/SE Asia & S. Pacific at Cummins said: "We would like to thank once again Cambridge Cleantech for their brilliant support and most specially, we would like to congratulate Epicam."
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