Driven by genius

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“Biomimicry is a method where you study principles of nature and apply them to man-made objects,” Irwin says. It follows that his turbine blades are built based on the progression of phi ¬— a.k.a. the golden ratio, or approximately 1.618 — in its design. “If nature’s had billions of years to evolve, there’s got to be some great design. It makes the blades highly efficient.”

Besides its biomimetic design, the BioHAWT is also unique because of the integrated generator. “The generator is built right into the apparatus,” Irwin says.

Irwin says the power generated by the BioHAWT — about 400 watts — can be used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen to be stored for future use as fuel or charge a battery.

“If it was running at optimal speed, it could probably power a refrigerator,” Irwin says.

The BioHAWT is still in development phase, Irwin says, but he hopes to land financing to bring the product to market by 2011. In the meantime, re:thought has plenty of other offerings, including LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) consulting and certification and other green product design.
www.re-thought.org

Commercial Product of the Year: Vandyne SuperTurbo, Ed VanDyne
The concept of a superturbocharger was most notably used on aircraft during World War II, but it has spent most of its postwar years in mothballs.

Ed VanDyne, president, CEO and CTO of VanDyne SuperTurbo Inc., has revived the concept by migrating it from air to land for use in more efficient automobiles.

“The key to the efficiency game is making engines smaller with the same power as a bigger engine,” says VanDyne, touting his SuperTurbo as a 30 percent efficiency boost to the internal combustion status quo.

Two-thirds of this efficiency gain comes from using a smaller engine, and the remaining 10 percent is owed to “a supercharger that’s actually made out of a turbocharger,” VanDyne says.

Powered by a car’s waste heat, the aptly named SuperTurbo turns a turbine attached to the crankshaft via its own transmission. The resulting power boost allows the manufacturer to use a four-cylinder instead of a V6, or a V6 instead of a larger V8 without a loss in performance.

VanDyne says his technology does not require retooling and only costs $350 per car if the car company installs it at the factory. He developed the technology with his unnamed former company, a spinoff from MIT and now a part-owner of VanDyne SuperTurbo.

“They didn’t want to keep it in-house, so I licensed the technology and went out on my own,” he says. And since going out on his own last year, he has landed orders from six major auto manufacturers — none of them American — to buy $100,000 prototypes of his SuperTurbo.

His current model can hit 80,000 revolutions per minute; the coming six prototypes will be able to hit 220,000. He plans to deliver them this spring. The manufacturers will test them internally and evaluate the technology for their 2012 models, at the earliest, at which point VanDyne hopes to graduate from research and development to manufacturing. “The goal is to take this into production ourselves,” he says. “We’ve been asked by our customers — they would support us.”

Working exclusively with Asian and European customers, VanDyne says Detroit auto manufacturers are getting “exactly what they deserve, because they’ve been running their companies with accountants in charge” — and the accountants have run them into the ground.

“Toyota, they operate with an engineering mindset,” he adds. “That maximizes profit. If there is truly a competitive advantage, they see the value in it. In the U.S., it’s such an accounting mentality, it’s all about buying cheaper parts. They see the part and not the system.”
www.vandynesuperturbo.com

Software Product of the Year: Orchestr8’s AlchemyGrid, Elliot Turner
“We provide infrastructure to content owners and e-commerce websites,” says Elliot Turner, founder and CEO of Denver-based Orchestr8. “We provide the ability to extract relevancy from your data.”

An example: A reader on a newspaper’s website has a sidebar of links to suggested related articles. Orchestr8’s AlchemyGrid makes such suggestions with an artificial intelligence that digs deeper than mere keywords.

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