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Beaufort Construction Inc. features XRDI, maker of engines for military KillerBee unmanned aerial vehicles

Founded in 1996 and owned by Beaufort natives Merritt Patterson and Leith Webb, Beaufort Construction Inc. is northern Beaufort County’s premier commercial construction company. Over the years, the company has built more than 102 commercial structures ranging from the Hilton Head Airplane Hanger complex to the Port Royal Center and the Lady’s Island BB&T bank.

Beaufort Construction Inc. is bringing to the readers of The Beaufort Tribune a series of articles about the buildings it has constructed with a focus on the people who operate the businesses in the buildings. Inside these building of brick and steel here in Beaufort county are interesting stories. Here is the first one.

On the cutting edge, XRDI (www.xrdi.com) makes engines for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with names such as Killer Bee, Shadow, Mark 4.7, Golden Eye and Fury. XRDI also makes engines for generators, electric–hybrid vehicles and marine vessels.

Engineer Andy Allen loves his job too much to retire. Designing and developing lightweight multi-fuel engines is his idea of fun. “I’ve been interested in engines as long as I can remember,” Allen said. “It’s really just a hobby that’s totally out of control.”

XRDI’s headquarters, located in Beaufort, was built by Beaufort Construction, Inc. under a design-build contract. The building features an explosive-proof room with walls 12-inches thick filled with sand to withstand the blast of a mishap during engine testing. The structure is a 10,000-square-foot light industrial building located in Beaufort Industrial Village off Burton Hill Road, which has become a hub of commercial businesses in Beaufort.

Andy Allen is originally from Savannah. His father was a pulpwood supplier to Union Bag and Paper Company. As a kid, he tagged along with his dad during forest harvesting near Fort Stewart and found the wreckage of drones used by the military for target practice. He used the engines he recovered from the debris of crashed drone and disassembled them. That’s what piqued his interest in designing lightweight engines. Now he’s designing them for use in the surveillance drones used by today’s military.

Allen studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, then went to work for aeronautics giant Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut in the mid 1960s. One of his projects was combustion research related to developing engines for the Supersonic Transport or SST. The plane never really “took off” in the United States after commercial supersonic passenger planes were rejected by Congress in 1971, but “it was a great experience,” Allen said.

After his stint with Pratt & Whitney Allen returned to Savannah to work on machinery specifically designed for forest harvesting conditions in the Southeast. “I always have come back to the engine thing though,” he admitted. In the early ’80s he moved to North Carolina, eventually starting AMW in Spartanburg to build engines for a couple of classes of automobiles in Sports Car Club of America competitions. His customers won 10 national championships with Allen’s engines. But his fascination with aircraft engines never waned.

“My two oldest sons were in a software business that became very, very successful,” Allen said. They retired from software development several years ago but they backed their dad in his new venture, enabling Allen to start XRDI in 2000. “They understood my obsession with building engines, and they also understood we had some technology that was promising,” he explained. Allen’s sons have since sold their position in XRDI to Forrest Bowen of Bluffton and to Merritt Patterson of Beaufort Construction, Inc.

“What we do is very high-tech,” Allen said. The two-stroke engines developed by XRDI are “clean and fuel efficient. They also have some unique characteristics that allow them to burn diesel-type fuels or military jet fuels for instance, in spite of the fact that they are spark-ignited and lightweight. That’s a prescription for use in drone aircraft. Our technology enables that.”

XRDI is “well connected in the two-stroke engine business on a world-wide basis,” he said, through a partnership with retired professor Gordon Blair of Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. “Gordon has literally written the book on the design and development of these engines and has written the computer code that really allows us to develop these engines to their potential,” he said.

While XRDI won’t profit directly from the recently announced Boeing plant coming to Charleston, Allen sees it as a boon to the technology base in the area. “It’s going to raise the awareness of engineering and high-tech design and development here,” he said. “It will be nice to have other engineers with the same sorts of passions, educational backgrounds and training in the area.”

“I have a tendency to just get locked in my cave here and play with my toys,” Allen admitted. “I work with a couple of excellent designers including Brian Books and Peter Allen.” he said. “I do basic sketching in a CAD (computer assisted design) program and the basic engineering, and then I hand those off to these guys. They flesh them out into 3-D models. Those get translated directly into models sent out to a foundry to produce prototype castings, or they go into our machine shop where Beauforts best sailor, Butch Mumma, carves parts out of a block of aluminum or steel.”

“We have built engines from scratch right here in this facility in Beaufort, and we do it pretty regularly,” he said. “We have some fairly sophisticated testing equipment.”

Allen sees big things ahead for XRDI. “I think we have a huge future in these military markets. Also commercial and automotive applications look promising as we begin to work with ICAR (the International Center for Automotive Research) in the Greenville area,” he said.

None of this would have happened in Beaufort but for the foresight and determination of Andy Allen and the commercial construction know-how of Beaufort Construction, Inc. Beaufort Construction Inc. is located at 2732 Depot Road, Beaufort SC 29902, telephone: 843.521.9766, fax: 843.521.9438, email: patterson@islc.net, web site: www.beaufortconstruction.net.

Check out these videos of a UAVs mission scenario at www.killerbeeuas.com.

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