Is MayMaan’s Modern Take On The Steam Engine The Future Of Energy?

MayMaan’s first flagship engine, the Aquastroke 2.3 liter.

Image courtesy MayMaan

In the quest to electrify everything, we run the risk of missing out on a potentially superior alternative for reducing emissions: an improved internal combustion engine. That’s exactly where MayMaan’s Aquastroke clean-energy engine technology comes in. According to the company, its new engine tech not only delivers lower emissions, but also improves upon the torque, reliability and efficiency currently delivered by legacy internal combustion engines.

In 2023, MayMaan, a global company headquartered in Hollywood, Florida, closed a $30 million Series A funding round backed by WAVE Equity Partners. The company is now contemplating a Series B round as well, with a specific goal of opening new market segments. Michael Shmueli, MayMaan’s VP of corporate communications, explained to me in an interview, “The money goes strictly into R & D to develop higher output engines, because at the end of the day, our basis is the higher output engines we develop, the more markets we can enter. For example, the 35-kilowatt generator is a 2.3-liter engine. The more funding we have, the higher output we could go to—half a megawatt to three megawatts—and those open up different industries for us as a company.”

The Aquastroke engine runs on a combination of 70% plain water and 30% bio-alcohol (either ethanol or methanol). It is essentially a combination of a standard ICE and a steam engine. MayMaan’s technology uses the alcohol for ignition and expansion similar to how a standard ICE operates. That combustion also turns the water to steam, adding to the expansion forces that drive the engine’s cylinders. The evaporation step also keeps the engine temperature much lower than in a standard ICE, which reduces the formation of harmful emissions like NO_x. “I like to give this analogy: at the end of the day, internal combustion engines are like the human body,” said Shmueli. “Whatever you put inside your human body is the output that you receive at the end of the day. You eat junk food, you perform in a junk food manner. You put you eat a clean, healthy diet, and you perform in a much healthier and efficient way. We took the same approach when it came to internal combustion engines, and that is fueling it with water-based fuels in our scenario… The result of this is we’re receiving very high torque at a low RPM range.”

Because of the size of its current commercial engine offerings, MayMaan has focused primarily on electrical generator applications. An early adopter of the technology is SPIE in the Netherlands, an employer of 55,000 people focused on engineering and project management, and specializing in energy, infrastructure, and industrial installations. With a need to guard against electrical outages due to grid congestion on current projects, the company chose to go with MayMaan-powered primary and backup generators. I spoke with Jacco Saaman, SPIE’s director of business development, by videoconference to learn more.

“One of the topics we were looking for was a stabilized 50 hertz or 60 hertz generator set which we can use,” he said. “The generators we have in Europe are based on diesel, gasoline, petrol, and a lot of factories are searching for a better petrol. You have the petrol with the high octane and so on, the different green petrol sources, but they still produce too much CO₂ and NO_x because of the high temperature. And so we went in with the MayMaan solution, in order to put it in place where we have grid congestion.”

Saaman sees additional potential future benefits as well, by using the engine’s steam exhaust as part of the utility solutions SPIE provides. “We have several requests for building areas where house blocks need to be built, but also factories where they have too little energy, because they need to go to electrifying the furnaces instead of using gas. But they need electricity for heating up their processes. So it’s electricity MayMaan is producing, but they are also producing 300 degrees of hot steam, so that can be used in the smaller industries.”

MayMaan’s business model is to form strategic partnerships with established global suppliers who can help expand its application opportunities. “We position ourselves as an IP and technology company,” Shmueli said. “We don’t deal with the end users. That’s not our business model. We license out our technologies to big engine OEMs and energy utilities that have the infrastructure and the ability to service our product and to offer it to their ecosystem of customers.”

Due to the constraints on engine size at this stage of the development of its technology, MayMaan has focused primarily on electrical generator applications. But Shmueli sees much bigger and broader opportunities on the horizon, covering everything from automotive and heavy equipment to grid-scale energy generation and industrial primary power. “At the end of the day, our technology is scalable to any output engine,” he said. “The possibilities are endless based on how you configure whatever solution you’re trying to get to.”