Free Floating Piston Engine

FFPE

An universal Free Floating Piston Engine (FFPE, or STELZER-MOTOR, named after its inventor) is available now to retrofit Ingersoll Rand and other brands of high pressure converters in WaterJet Cutting Systems. These systems, by design, are energy hungry. A 45 to 80 kW electric motor is used to operate the hydraulics and most systems run more than 16 hours a day!

Therefore, enormous savings on energy costs can be realized by a serious investment in innovative "laboratory gadgets" in which many believers invested most of their "quality time" during the last 20 years. This missionary-work lead to many improvements in the mechanical design & manufacturing of the FFPE.

The pre-series production reduced the costs of the FFPE by 40% already. While still high due mostly to the rapid-prototyping costs, the list price today is not that bad at all compared to the best stationary Diesel engines in the same kW power class.

Without the exhaust emissions of Diesels, plenty of NG and LPG sources widely available and a 'realistic' price tag compared to other offerings on the World Wide Web, we are sure the FFPE will breakthrough eventually.

An every-day real-world application of the FFPE however, would not be possible without system-management of an advanced DSP-controller, fortunately one of our areas of expertise and field of specialization for our CNC-systems.

Our DSP based Engine Management Features are:

• Real Time Piston-Velocity and Piston-Position Prediction
• High Speed Linear Encoder Data Processing
• Cylinder Pressure Based Engine Control
• Non Intrusive Cylinder Pressure Sensing
• Power Take Off and Starter Servo Management
• Single Point, Natural Gas or G4/5 LPG injection
• Extensive Safety and Diagnostic Routines

Today, an Electron Beam Melting process

as used by Rapid Titanium produces most parts of the FFPE/STARTER/PUMP unit from POWDER. All high-stress / high-temperature parts are CoCr (Cobalt Chromium) and Non-Ferro parts are either Ti6Al4V (Titanium Alloy) or LS-N, Laser Sintered Nylon.

More about this manufacturing process can be found in this brochure [1.302 KB] .

An exploded view of the FFPE