The Prior Art Project

Ideas belong to everyone. These are mine. Take the free ones, more will follow.

I've been inventing things my whole life. Some became patents. This is where I publish some of my ideas: openly, permanently, and free for anyone to use. Every idea here is also filed as a defensive publication with a timestamped DOI — which makes it prior art, so no company, no troll, and no bad actor can ever patent it and lock the world out. For the "Free to Use" section, not even me.

If you can build something from the "Free to Use" section of this page, build it. Improve it. Sell it. Give it away. You don't owe me anything but a fair shake for the next inventor. Now go and make the world a better place. — Ernest N. Sumrall

Predict the future by creating it

Free to use (CC BY 4.0)

  • Laser-Ignited Hydrogen Engine (Aug 2026). Electrode-free prechamber ignition for ultra-lean hydrogen ICE, 7.2% brake thermal efficiency gain. Read the paper

  • Energy Accounting for PFAS Treatment (Jul 2026). One honest yardstick for comparing PFAS technologies, from capture to full mineralization. Read the paper

  • Point-of-Generation PFAS Capture (Jul 2026). Catch and destroy PFAS at the factory stack, before it ever reaches water. Read the paper

Published research (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

  • Project HEADWATER (Jul 2026). Desalinate at the Dead Sea using 440 meters of free gravity head, and refill the sea while doing it. Read the paper

  • Project POLARIS (Jul 2026). A 500 MW AI campus on an Arctic coast: ocean-cooled, renewably powered, zero fresh water. Read the paper

Patent pending, published for the record

  • Project POLYNEURON (Aug 2026). A fault-tolerant architecture for distributed artificial cognition. U.S. provisional filed Aug 26, 2026. Read the paper

Zenodo (version of record): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22234994

Figshare (mirror pointer): https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.33543772