Keyou speeds up development of emission-free engines with CONTACT Cloud

The Munich-based start-up develops innovative solutions for hydrogen engines. With end-to-end processes, Keyou can quickly react to customer requirements in a highly competitive market. The innovation leader benefits from CONTACT’s scalable and secure SaaS solution.

While battery-electric drives are becoming increasingly popular in passenger cars, they still come with heavy trade-offs in commercial vehicles. Operators are faced with significantly higher initial costs. At the same time, the vehicles’ payloads and ranges decrease, since batteries have a significantly lower energy density than fossil fuels. The German start-up Keyou has identified hydrogen as the energy carrier to bridge the gap between economic efficiency and zero local emissions. Hydrogen stores almost three times as much energy per kilogram as diesel or gasoline and reacts during combustion to harmless water vapor.

Since 2015 Keyou develops software and hardware components that transform diesel and gasoline engines into hydrogen engines. To make them fit for hydrogen operation, they are modified with an efficient injection, exhaust gas recirculation, turbocharging, and an H2-specific ignition system. Special combustion processes, developed by Keyou, reduce pollutants from the combustion of nitrogen and lubricating oil. Keyou’s technology is vendor-neutral and can be transferred to existing engine designs with little effort. It paves the way for emission-free vehicles and represents an important step towards climate-friendly mobility.

Commercial vehicles with hydrogen engines cause no local emissions. (© Keyou)

Keyou’s growth and the increasing number of projects make product development more complex. With CIM Database PLM from the Cloud, Keyou ensures efficient and secure processes throughout the entire product development. Users can store CAD and Office files in the CONTACT Cloud and quickly retrieve them at any time. CIM Database is connected to the existing multi-CAD environment and, with its integrated project management, enables smooth collaboration between all project participants.

The scalable Cloud solution can be expanded with additional functionality. In order to minimize efforts for implementation and maintenance of the PLM system, Keyou chose CONTACT’s Software as a Service (SaaS) option. “SaaS relieves us of many tasks that are typically associated with implementing and operating a PLM system,” says Markus Schneider, COO of Keyou. “This allows us to focus our energy on our main goal: To develop hydrogen engines and provide operators with an emission-free drive solution that’s economically viable today.”

About CONTACT Software

CONTACT is the leading vendor of open standard software and open source pioneer for the product engineering process and the digital transformation. Our products make it easier to organize projects, execute processes reliably and collaborate with others around the world on the basis of virtual product models and their digital twins. Our open technology and Elements platform are ideal for integrating additional IT systems and the Internet of Things to create end-to-end business processes.