The Sterling Engine!

[Krime]

ladys n gentleman, I present to you, the sterling engine. very simple to make and can be used to spin cogs that turn dc engines into battery chargers, and on very large scales, full on electricity! in the class im in, my teacher has a very small scale one that can charge a AA battery, but it has to be pointed at the sun, directly. we will be building on on a larger scale sometime in the future thanks to me asking an taking interest haha. ill try to take pictures! these pictures I post are nothing like my professors, however, it will show the basic functions. these can easily be made post-shtf!

 

[jimLE]

i like the one that looks like a satilite dish..in which im now thinking.one like it,and it stays lined up with the sun..

 

[Krime]

i like the one that looks like a satilite dish..in which im now thinking.one like it,and it stays lined up with the sun..

you see though, it doesn't just stay lined up, but with the "cone" you're likely not to have to move it every 2 seconds. even the big ones, and their are huge ones, need to be linked by computer to shift them. the solar panel farms do that too. the panels have guys in other locations on computers shifting them throughout the day following the sun. pretty neat n handy though. there's other ways to handle the movement though, like the "crystal ball" technique, where you take what very much looks like a crystal ball, and it will take the sun no matter where it is and transfer it. im still not quite sure how that works yet, but as I learn, I plan to share information on this site. lets hope things go as planned! lol

 

[DrHenley]

This stirred up some dormant memories. The atrophied brain cells are starting to show some life and it's starting to come back to me slowly. (A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I was a Thermodynamics Professor)

The highest efficiency possible in a heat engine is represented by the idealized "Carnot Cycle." In practice a true Carnot Engine is not possible to construct, but the Stirling Engine comes close to the efficiency of the Carnot Cycle. To get maximum efficiency you have to have a regenerative heat exchanger, but since that is rather complex, most Stirling Engines have a displacer instead, which is usually an extra piston above the drive piston.

There are a few advantages of the Stirling Engine over steam engines, such as the fact that you don't have a boiler that can explode, and you heat the cylinder directly (which is the reason for the high efficiency). Even if a cylinder fails (which they did), it is not nearly as catastrophic as a boiler failure.

The reason the Stirling Engine fell out of favor for large scale applications and lost out to the steam engine was that since the cylinder had to be heated directly to a high temperature, the failure rate of the piston and cylinder was unacceptably high. Nowadays we have superior materials that can overcome that limitation.

For small scale applications, the Stirling Engine was successful until the advent of inexpensive electric motors, which eliminated the need for a heat source.

You could say that the Stirling Engine was ahead of its time, and now that vastly superior materials are available, maybe it's time has arrived...