Micro Fuel Pumps for Small, Heavy Fuel Engines

The proliferation of small, unmanned systems has established a nascent market for small, lightweight power plants, including both internal combustion engines and turbine systems. Recently, researchers have successfully developed breakthrough technologies in this market, such as the Meyer Nutating Engine. While the underlying combustion technology has been proven, one limitation is that all commercially available support components, such as fuel-pumps and fuel injectors, are bigger than the base engine itself. Novel re-design of these required components is needed to realize the potential of power plant innovations for unmanned systems. Axis Engineering Technologies, in collaboration with Kinetic-BEI, proposes to develop an active material based fuel pump for use on a small, lightweight engine. In Phase I, two competing active material systems will be developed simultaneously, based on both piezoelectric ceramic and ferromagnetic shape memory alloy actuation. The side-by-side development of these competing technologies in Phase I shall yield a superior technology to carry forward into Phase II hardware development.