LiquidPiston has also extended its capital raise into crowdfunding with a site launched last year allowing individual investors to buy into the company starting at $2,000. “This is a long-cycle, hard-science kind of business figuring out how to do this,” Suneby said. With nearly $45 million in total funding from venture capital, private equity and government agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), LiquidPiston has evolved its engine through five iterations and is nearing a sellable product, said Per Suneby, senior vice president for corporate development. That flexibility could make the X Engine an important part of transitioning away from fossil fuels, Shkolnik said. LiquidPiston’s engine can run on gasoline, the “heavy fuels” used by the military like diesel and jet fuel, and even gas fuels like propane and hydrogen. In the process, the company has secured more than 80 patents for its technology and is poised to enter the $400 billion market for engines and hybrid power systems, Alexander Shkolnik said. Starting from a theoretical foundation in the thermodynamic cycle, the Shkolniks designed an engine made of traditional metals with only two moving parts that is one-fifth the size of typical engines of the same horsepower. “It was just annoyance with the low efficiency of conventional engines,” Nikolay Shkolnik said of his inspiration. Shkolnik’s father, Nikolay, launched the X Engine project in 2007 after his physics training prompted him to rethink the internal combustion engine.
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