Saturday, July 19, 2008

Stirling Walking Beam

I made a Stirling engine before, but it wasn't "real" in the sense of "having traditional engine parts, like a flywheel and crankshaft". Also, it would be pretty difficult to scale that one up or extract power from it as is. So this is my first regular ENGINE engine. (This is called a "walking beam" engine--many other configurations are possible.)

One reason I built this one was to prove to myself that I really understood how they worked. For that reason, I designed this all myself. Not that there's SO MUCH there. Also, there are tons of videos on YouTube that are identical to mine.

It's be really awesome to scale this up. Like with an oil drum for the displacer cylinder. I'd start that right away, except not only do I not have an oil drum, I'd need access to machine tools to make the power cylinder.

Tips

  • With the power piston shaft and displacer piston shaft mounted on the same point, getting distances right is a little tricky. It's a big parallelogram this way. Make them separate next time. Maybe even on a rotating collar so the phase angle between can be modified.
  • If the shaft tiepoints have a lot of play in them, the engine works jerkily if at all (because all the motion is taken up in using the play).
  • I think I overdid it on the height and underdid it on the width. Could have used a little angle-reducing distance on the piston shaft. Alternatively, shorten the stroke.
  • The flywheel is a little heavy. The momentum should carry it through the compression stroke, it shouldn't have to be barely sucked in.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

New Results

Latest solar trough configuration:

A few details:

  1. Those are just simple, band-sawn parabolic arches. The mirror is attached with velcro. Works awesome. Ly.
  2. I suspended the mirror from the pipe thinking that would keep the focal length constant while allowing simples changes of elevation. Why do I always go straight for the complicatedest solution in the universe?
And data from same:

The highest temp on there is almost 140°C. That's over 280°F. According to my rough calculations, the four steepest upward slopes indicate powers in the range of 20-25 watts. (Some of those dropouts are me messing around with the setup, some are cloud cover. Also, I later discovered that true solar south is like 15 or 20° east of where I've been pointing.)

Two big changes from the last run, other than the already-mentioned one of shortening the excess pipe.

  1. Painted the pipe flat black.
  2. Used a laser pointer to adjust the focus. I mounted a frosted glass square (I happen to have a bunch I bought for just such a use as this) at what I thought would be the focal length. Then I stood back and aimed the laser pointer in a roughly perpendicular way and looked where the point fell. This really needs a System to keep it perpendicular, but anyway I was able to determine that my focus was off by over an inch.
I'm thinking the Mark III will be the last iteration. Pointing in the right direction, and simplifying the pointing a little, may let me add another 10-20 degrees to the peak but that will be about as far as I can go with these simple materials and using an open-air design.