When I last wrote about West Springfield's Scuderi Group ("Strokes of Genius," March 9, 2006), the family business's patriarch and principal inventor of the Scuderi split-cycle engine, Carmelo Scuderi, had recently passed away. At that time, the senior Scuderi's back-to-formula redesign of the internal combustion engine still only existed in theory, though the foundations of its principals and the promise of its potential were already garnering considerable attention.
Through the combined efforts of the seemingly tireless Scuderi family, local investors, politicians, and proponents of everything from environmental conservation to potential local jobs, the Scuderi engine has at last been built, and one of the two prototypes was unveiled on May 11 at the Eastern States Exposition's Storrowtown Carriage House (the other is currently working overtime in real-time testing at an R&D facility in San Antonio, Texas).
The Scuderi engine is a split-cycle engine that separates the processes of combustion and compression into dedicated cylinders, and which has also been adapted to include a compressed-air hybrid system, making the design superior in performance and fuel efficiency and significantly reducing harmful emissions. The prototype engine debuted at the April 20 Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) 2009 World Congress in Detroit, parked itself for a short week at the Big E, and is off to Germany in June for expos in Stuttgart, Munich and Frankfurt.
In attendance at the Carriage House were many of the Scuderis' early supporters, including former Mass. State Rep.-turned-consultant Paul Caron and U.S. Rep. John Olver, as well as many other state reps and state senators, a mayor or two, and head of the Massachusetts Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Andre Porter. The unveiling was proof positive that grassroots, family-owned and locally-supported entrepreneurial ventures are far from being a thing of the past; that even today such organic, homegrown endeavors have the potential to realize global achievement, in much the same way that industrial advances were successfully launched from Western Massachusetts in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Building the prototype and processing the mountains of patent paperwork that will serve to fortify the Scuderi Group's position as owners and licensers of the revolutionary technology did not come cheap. Originally the company sought Federal funding (with Olver's aid) through the Department of Defense in the form of a $1.2 million grant, but ultimately wound up turning down the money to avoid unwanted strings attached to the deal. Instead, they managed to raise approximately $38 million through private investment, largely in Western Massachusetts, and have secured more than two hundred patents to date and laid the groundwork for possible licensing of their engine designs to a number of major manufacturers, including Italy's Fiat, Germany's Daimler and Japan's Honda Motor Co.
