Julie Blumreiter
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, CLEARFLAME ENGINE TECHNOLOGIES
AWARD-WINNING STARTUP ClearFlame Engine Technologies is working to bring clean, carbon-negative, high-performance engine solutions to market. ClearFlame’s engine conversion can convert diesel engines to run on cleaner fuels that are also more affordable—lower carbon than an EV today and lower cost than operating a diesel truck, said co-founder and CTO Julie Blumreiter. “It can save money and lower emissions at the same time. There’s not a lot of things that can do that.”
In Blumreiter’s opinion, the future of diesel is quite clearly going to low emissions solutions. Not only highway trucks—but also farm equipment, construction, mining, rail, and marine. “All the really big, hardworking equipment that keeps the world running,” she said. The vision is to have machines that never turn off—just swap drivers and keep it running.
Blumreiter shared that ClearFlame plans to roll out its first trucks to customers this year. She explained that there are routes that can be electrified, and routes where they cannot turn the equipment off—you have to haul really heavy loads and only fill up every 800 miles. And those are the ones ClearFlame is testing the technology on.
“Pretend you don’t know the information of what people would expect from you based on how you look and proceed accordingly.”
Julie Blumreiter
Working on something novel and unexpected means pushbacks are hard to avoid. A pet peeve for Blumreiter is being told that something isn’t possible, even though she has the data to back it. But it’s also the type of thing that encourages her to push harder and prove it possible.
Blumreiter didn’t know any engineers growing up—meaning she had no preconceived idea of what an engineer should look like, and that freed her from any sense of gender bias until she was already in the field. “This is who I am. I’m going to keep doing this,” she said, adding that it was the difference between knowing and not knowing how other people thought of her. “It’s part of the playing field because you can’t control it. You can only control whether you get tripped up by it or not.”
Blumereiter wrote about her work in the June/July 2023 issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine and in an article on ASME.org.
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