Dynamo Value Proposition: Turbo Core Design Credo

The Dynamo value proposition is conceptually very simple.  Dynamo provides portable power with a reliable, fuel flexible engine.  

But this is just a short hand version of what customers really need, which is the ability to have power generated when and where they need it, while being accessible to existing staff and leveraging their existing supply chain.  Ultimately this will minimize operating costs and maximize availability.

 

This is a universal need and our competitors would be remiss if they ignored this fundamental fact while they try to provide products to meet customer needs.  What we find is there are many of you who are on this website looking for something different, because the existing products do not meet that basic need. 

How do we provide you with superior value? To do this we stick to three simple tenants which guide our product development.

First,

we are building a product that “just works.”  Years of formula racing taught our team that having a robust design is far more important than having the lightest car or the fanciest widgets.  No one will care how fast you are, unless you can cross the finish line.  To that end we are going back to basics with our turbine to build a simple, robust platform that will always perform when you need it. 

This point has significant depth.  Not only does it have to work here in our Development Center in Boston, but it also needs to work on the Alaskan North Slope and in the Texas Gulf Coast, a reflection of the fact that we are playing in a global market with diverse environmental and operational requirements.  We also focused on fuel flexibility as part of this guiding principle.  No matter where you are in the world, we want you to be able to run a Dynamo generator.  Most of us default to diesel, but that may not be the easiest fuel to obtain.  To that end we are building a product that will work on the broadest ranges of fuels, from low BTU natural gas through diesel.  Part of making it “just work” also means the engine has to be self-adapting.  That means you as the end user don’t have to tell the engine what you filled it up with.  Just fill it up, hit start, and we will do the rest.

 Second, 

we are building a product that is easy to maintain.  Having a product that requires maintenance only once a year does help reduce the pain of conducting maintenance, but that is not good enough.  As robust as we make our product, something unpredictable can and will happen in the field, which means it can’t be a challenge to get the generator operational again. 
One of the reasons that diesel engines dominate the world of power generation is the relatively low skill set required to conduct maintenance and consequently the ease of finding qualified maintenance personnel.  No matter where you are in the world, you should be able to find a diesel mechanic who will eventually get your generator operational.  On the other hand, identifying and training a service network has been a huge choke point for most types of alternative energy.  Internally our goal is to make servicing a cinch.  We want even the most complex service to take less than hour.  To achieve this, we designed a whole new turbine platform that will make it easy to remove, repair, and replace any significant part of our prime mover.  Furthermore, we focus on leveraging the same skills and tools already used by diesel service providers today. 

Building a product this way means we can leverage existing service networks to provide service when and where it is needed; it also means we can get you back up and running sooner than the competition.  Lastly, and just as importantly, it means you don’t have to wait for us if you need the product today, as we have made every effort to make sure the product is simple for you to service too. 

Lastly, 

we are focusing on a modular engine platform.  We realize that all of you have different power needs.  You need power as small as 1kW to over 75kW.  Doing that cost effectively, with minimal variation in product quality and serviceability necessitates a design that is flexible and easily modularized.

Beyond making sure we can provide you with a broad range of products, we are also doing this because turbines are a little bit different from your traditional Diesel.  We realize when you buy a 10kW product you know that is what you need.  We know you don’t want to have to deal with figuring out how humidity, or altitude, or temperature will affect the performance of our product.  We can easily make minute changes to the hardware and software to provide you with the power you need, especially when we leverage modular components.

Finally, we know many of you have changing power needs.  Perhaps your oil well begins to decline or your family starts to grow.  Leveraging a modular engine platform means instead of having to chuck out the entire genset, a power change will be as simple as replacing a few parts. 

It is with these guiding principles that we will deliver a product that will be in a class all its own.

What is Dynamo Series, Part 3: What is the innovation?

Dynamo is developing a new type of turbine engine, but what is the innovation?

We did not invent a new type of manufacturing process, nor a new super alloy, nor a new bearing technology. 

We developed a new approach to gas turbine design that steps beyond traditional industrial turbine design, and we took key learnings from the automotive industry, the silicon industry, and the computer industry. 

The one thing the other three industries have in common is the ability to build a range of products in high volume and deploy them annually.  Every year there is a new laptop, a new CPU chip, and a new model year car.  Much of this change is market driven, but the results are enabled by technology.  While the products are functionally commodities (A chip, a computer, a vehicle), they are differentiated at the product level with broad ranges of prices ranging across an order of magnitude; this is brought about by specific engagement with customer needs.   

By contrast, the turbine industry typically deploys an engine once every 10-20 years and builds anywhere from 10-1000 engines a year—a far cry from the high cycle high volume markets I just described, which routinely deploy tens to hundreds of thousands of units of product a year. 

This is achieved through driven development cycles where new architectures are routinely built then continuously updated over several years.  This is enabled by a high volume market where engineering and manufacturing overhead can be monetized over many units of production.  Low costs are maintained however, by leveraging a common manufacturing platform, with interchangeable components which can be easily adjusted to adapt to customer needs.  

To enable this type of rapid innovation, the traditional turbine needs to be broken up into its constituent parts.  Doing so creates a system that is less finely balanced, but necessitates a product that is more robust and more resilient than existing engines.  To enable this, Dynamo has developed a modular turbine that enables us to scale the product on a unified manufacturing platform.  The components of the turbine share a standard interface, but can be tuned within a range of operations to enable different functions.  This is similar to how modern computers are built, where in the CPU, hard drive, and RAM can be changed; by selecting a combination of these components the computer can be customized for different user experiences.  For example we can offer different variants of the same generator; by changing the compressor we can tune the efficiency, or by swapping the combustor we can change the fuel to be used.  This allows us to customize the product on a component level to meet the customers’ specific needs.  On the lab bench it also means we can engineer and improve these components independently of the rest of the engine. 

Ultimately this means we can develop new engine architectures every few years and deploy component level improvements to the engine to keep design and performance fresh as customers demand them.

What is Dynamo Series, Part 2: Taking a step back

Often-times we get asked “Why don’t you just make the most efficient engine you can?”  The answer is simple.  Customers don’t want the most efficient product.  They want the most valuable product.  Most simply, they want a product that solves a real problem.  Ultimately this translates to systemic efficiencies.  On a simple level, the most efficient product is often times the most expensive, and while this is a noble technical pursuit, there are few problems in the world that are as black and white as needing a more efficient engine.

The customers we target are ones who have fundamental problems such as basic access to power.  The source of this problem may be as simple as having an irregular fuel source, an unpalatable cost of maintenance, or current products being physically too large for customers to use.  These problems are generally true in markets where the power grid doesn’t exist, so it is these fundamental problems we chose to solve by returning to the basics of the engine.

On top of solving a problem, we have to do this cost effectively.  There are several approaches to deploying a product like ours.  The first is to try and build a solution that is all things to all people [The Capstone Model], the second is to start with a flexible core technology, and build hardware around it [The Honda Model], and the third is to build just the engine and let someone else build the solution [the Intel Model].  Trying to build a product that is all things for all people is difficult and expensive, because people want different things.  Building just the engine actually leaves a lot of value on the table.  While a CPU might be only 10-20% the cost of a laptop, the real value is in the laptop itself (what would you do with just a CPU?). 

Starting with a basic platform engine and then building custom solutions allows us to do two things:  We can capture more value around our product, and we can truly unlock the strengths of our product for customers with specific needs.  But to be this kind of agile company, we have to start with a basic engine that solves the fundamental needs of reliability, fuel flexibility and power density.

By providing our customers with a solution that works when and where they need it, we can change the power access paradigm; we can enable access to power irrespective of fuel or technical skill.  

What is Dynamo Series, Part 1: The core of the matter!

Dynamo Micropower is developing a new generation of microturbines.  As Ford Motor company is recognized as the company that replaced the horse and buggy with the mass produced automobile, Dynamo will change the small power paradigm with a new type of microturbine built for the mass market. 

We are recasting the traditional turbine to meet the needs of the mass market.  We started by focusing in on what the turbine is.  At its core, it is a simple engine with few moving parts.  It is a reliable work horse that is more powerful than other engines.  And to top it off, these engines are amazingly fuel flexible, having been used to burn fuels as varied as biogas through wood chips.  There is no doubt the mass market could use a product like this, but we have made two significant innovations that change the accessibility of this historic power house.

The first innovation revolves around scale mass manufacturing and the second focuses on ease of serviceability.  To appeal to a mass market, we need a product that can be manufactured in high volumes.  Not hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands of units.  And we must do this while achieving quality control, scalability, and a broad product line.  To achieve this we have implemented state of the art design practices and computational tools to allow us to deploy a flexible product; we have also designed into our business a dynamic and broad supply chain which will allow us to respond to customer needs in real time.  We have also done simple things, like minimizing the assembly time associated with our engine.  A traditional turbine takes highly skilled labor and a day to assemble, ours takes less than twenty minutes.  This simplifies quality, scale, and above all, performance.

We also made sure our product is easy to service, and here is why.  Whether you have a large 400 hp Ford-250 or a small 70 hp smart car, you have to do the same amount of maintenance every 3,000 miles.  The same is true for any other type of power generation, with maintenance becoming a bigger component of cost as the engines become smaller.  For the smallest generators, the maintenance is so cost prohibitive the engines themselves are effectively disposable.  With a simpler morphology and a dedication to minimizing maintenance, we have demonstrated the ability to tear down and rebuild an entire engine in less than twenty minutes.  Furthermore we have focused on keeping the skills and tools required to a minimum.  To date we only use a 7/16 wrench and a mallet to complete assembly.  Assembly itself will be intuitive, and can be done by following a simple instruction set analogous to the ones found among IKEA furniture. 

This does two things, primarily it makes the product more economic to maintain, but second it expands accessibility to the bulk of customers who would otherwise need special training to use and service our product.   

One of the things we constantly remind ourselves is that we are not building a perfect product for all people.  Instead we are building a product that is good enough for most and great for those who really need what we want to make.