Cyclone Power Technologies has commenced durability testing of its award winning Waste Heat Engine (WHE), the final stage prior to on-site beta installation.

Over the next month, Cyclone will run its WHE for a minimum of several hundred hours under the load of an electric alternator, the company states, adding it plans to break down the engine to study the effects of long term operation on parts and components prior to installation at its initial beta site.

“We believe we can debug any remaining mechanical issues in this test period and prepare our engine system for commercial operation,” states Allan Brown, Cyclone’s senior engineer on the WHE project. “While there’s more work to be done, we’ve made great progress in a short period of time.”

The WHE is a self-starting steam engine capable of producing up to 18HP (10kW of electricity) from low to medium-temperature waste heat sources such as industrial furnaces, commercial ovens and even solar thermal collectors.

The WHE is also the power source for the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office. The EATR was recently covered on Fox News, CNET News, Popular Science and Wired.

For more information, visit www.cyclonepower.com.