How to Build a Stirling Engine

How to Build a Stirling Engine - MonsterGuide.net

A stirling engine is one of the easiest engines that can be constructed, in a household. At the same time, the stirling engine that you construct can rotate at a maximum of 3000 rpm. But the fact is this engine can be made from scrap materials. All that you need to make a stirling engine is coke tins, red bull tins, high temperature glue, a silicon gasket, straight pins, coat hanger , pvc elbow, a balloon, a washer and a bolt.

Initially, you need to make a ring stand. For this you take a coke tin and make it hollow. Once it.s hollow, you will need to cut it into two halves. Take the bottom half and with the base ring, cut open the sides of the can and make it into a ring with three legs. The sides of the can have to be cut and bent to form a ring stand. After this, you need to make the pressure vessel. Take another coke can and scrap off its sides. Now cut the top portion off and make it into a vessel. This forms the bottom part of the pressure vessel. You need to make the top portion of the pressure vessel. For that, take a coke tin and cut about 2 inches from the bottom. Now take the bottom piece and make a hole in the center, with the pin. Now, glue the bolt and a small rectangular steel plate on the inner center of the top portion of the pressure vessel. This glue will prevent leakage. The displacer is made similar to the pressure vessel but it is made using the red bull tin. The displacer should be fitted inside the pressure vessel and you should ensure that no leakage takes place.

The coat hanger needs to be cut and from a piece of it a crankshaft should be made. Making a crankshaft should not be a problem. You need to provide support for the crank hence we cut two red bull tins and punch holes in them and keep them ready. Now fix the crank to the supporting material made and ensure that the crank rotates smoothly in them. Once the crank and support are ready, attach them on top of the pressure vessel. Now, cut a balloon in the shape of a disc and we can use it as a diaphragm. The diaphragm mainly connects the crank with the disk and it should be strong so that while rotating it should not get damaged. Now the engine is ready.

In order to run the engine, what you have to do is just heat the bottom portion of the pressure vessel and then after twenty to thirty seconds, gently push the flywheel and then the wheel will start to rotate. You need to constantly keep cooling the pressure vessel, as it may get overheated. In order to do that, you may place ice on top of the vessel but you should make sure that the water does not seep into the engine as it may spoil the entire process.

Sterling Engine Images

An Old Sterling Engine

Baby Sterling Engine

Baby Sterling Engine 003

Baby Sterling Engine 004

Gamma Sterling Engine

Simple Sterling Engine

Solar Concentration Sterling Engine

Sterling Engine or Hot Air Engine

The Sterling Engine

Ceiling Fan Wind Turbine Tutorials

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Permanent Magnet Generator - Stamford PMG System

For certain applications, permanent magnets can provide the magnetic field of a generator. The rotor structure can provided by a doughnut of magnetic iron with magnets fixed on its surface.
A magnetic flux density can be provided using by a radial depth of various types of magnetic materials comprising of neodymium-boron-iron or samarium-cobalt of less than 10 millimetres in the air gap corresponding to that produced with field windings.
A considerable reduction in air-gap flux density can be achieved by using magnet materials such as ferrite. Although this causes a corresponding increase in dimensions of the generator.
Permanent-magnet generators are simple because no system for the provision of field current is required. Although they are very dependable but they do not carry any means for assuring the output voltage.
A true example of application is with a wind turbine where the generator output of variable voltage and frequency is supplied to a power system through an electronic frequency converter.

For a series of relevant videos, please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKisECPf264&playnext=1&list=PLE07CEBB26FD4041E

Video Tutorials for using Car Alternator in Wind Turbines

Most of their time wind generators rotate at low rotations. Car alternators would not generate anything at lower speed of wind turbines. Therefore, using a car alternator in wind generator is really a poor option.

• The efficiency of alternator would never reach more than about 60 %. The bearings are very small and can not support large blades reliably (about 1.5 meters diameter). The car alternator has been designed as lightweight and robust being its functioning at very high rpm.
• Although a small blade can be used to make the alternator spin at high rpm. But smaller blades would catch less wind. You would need a high wind speed to obtain necessary speed of rotation.
• Gears with pulleys or other methods can be used to boost rpm. But a lot of power is wasted through friction. This would result in additional cost, further losses, added unreliability, and a horribly and awkwardly made project.
• There is another possibility of rewinding the alternator to run at lower speed. But this also means that there would be more turns of thin wire in each coil. In this method cut-in rotations are decreased, but losses in the coils are also increased, thus you would get decreased power output and further reducing the already low efficiency.
• Car or truck alternator is an electromagnetic device. It means that separate power is required by the alternator to make the magnetic field for its electromagnetic coils internally through brushes and slip rings.

Scientists make solar cells with cheap metal oxide

University of Oxford scientists have discovered a way to make solar cells from a metal oxide found in toothpaste.

A team led by Dr Henry Snaith at the physics department combined the oxide with a thin dye printed on to glass to turn the sun's energy into electricity.

The glass can be produced in a range of different transparent colours for use in windows and cladding buildings.

"It opens up a lot of versatility and a lot of possibilities for building design," said Dr Snaith.

Because the manufacturing process uses abundant, non-toxic materials the carbon footprint is considerably smaller than rival technologies.

Ollie Bennett, from MiPower, a company that specialises in installing solar panels, said he had not seen anything like the new cells on the market.

"I think this is a really good idea and it could be a forerunner," he said.

Dr Snaith said the team had still had some work to do on improving its efficiency.

"But coupled with our extremely low cost of manufacture and processing and the ongoing research effort to improve the overall performance of the device, we think it's only a short while till our performance will be competitive," he said.

Make Solar cells by waste vegetation

Remote communities could eventually make their own solar cells using waste vegetation, thanks to a design developed by researchers in Switzerland and the United States.

The technology is inspired by photosynthesis. In plant cells, sunlight separates electrical charges with almost 100 per cent efficiency.

Electrical charges must also be separated to create currents in solar cells. For the past decade, researchers have attempted to make solar cells by extracting some of the molecules responsible for photosynthesis — known as photosystem-I (PS-I) — from plants to produce an electric current when exposed to light.

Earlier devices failed to generate much electricity. But a team led by Andreas Mershin at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, now claims to have found a solution so simple it can be replicated in any lab.

They have found a way of exposing more of the cell to the sun by creating a three-dimensional miniature ‘forest’ of zinc oxide nanowires and titanium dioxide sponges on a layer of glass, coated with PS-I, that absorbs any sunlight filtering down onto the surface from above and turns it into electricity. Previous versions of the cell, by other researchers, were flat.

The new experimental solar cell converts 0.1 per cent of incoming sunlight’s energy to electricity. This is still short of the 1.0 per cent conversion rate it needs to be practical — but 10,000 times more than any previous cell of this sort.

Mershin hopes that, in a few years, rural communities would be able to mix waste vegetation — even grass clippings — into a bag containing the zinc and titanium, and paint the mixture onto their roofs to start generating electricity.

“All the major discoveries have now been made,” he told SciDev.Net.

“We hope that other groups around the world can now replicate what we’ve done and optimise the techniques — and that is why we have published our findings in an open-access journal.”

Devens Gust, director of the Arizona State University Center for Bio-Inspired Solar Fuel Production in the United States, said: “The advance here is devising a relatively simple method for preparing photovoltaic cells with significant light absorption for laboratory study using this material.”

But Frederik Krebs of the Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy in Denmark, who has experience of deploying organic solar cells in Africa, is more cautious.

“There is a very long way from a laboratory vision to a real live application to real live people having no knowledge of (the technology),” he said. He is also concerned that the sun could damage the organic material .

http://dawn.com/2012/02/19/idea-could-lead-to-cheap-solar-cells-using-plant-waste/

Solar panel made with ion cannon is cheap enough to challenge fossil fuels

Twin Creeks, a solar power startup that emerged from hiding today, has developed a way of creating photovoltaic cells that are half the price of today’s cheapest cells, and thus within reach of challenging the fossil fuel hegemony. The best bit: Twin Creeks’ photovoltaic cells are created using a hydrogen ion particle accelerator.

As it stands, almost every solar panel is made by slicing a 200-micrometer-thick (0.2mm) wafer from a block of crystalline silicon. You then add some electrodes, cover it in protective glass, and leave it in a sunny area to generate electricity through the photovoltaic effect (when photons hit the silicon, it excites the electrons and generates a charge). There are two problems with this approach: Much in the same way that sawdust is produced when you slice wood, almost half of the silicon block is wasted when it’s cut into 200-micrometer slices; and second, the panels would still function just as well if they were thinner than 200 micrometers, but silicon is brittle and prone to cracking if it’s too thin.

This is where Twin Creeks’ ion cannon, dubbed Hyperion, comes into play. If you look at the picture above, 3-millimeter-thick silicon wafers are placed around the outside edge of the big, spoked wheel. A particle accelerator bombards these wafers with hydrogen ions, and with exacting control of the voltage of the accelerator, the hydrogen ions accumulate precisely 20 micrometers from the surface of each wafer. A robotic arm then transports the wafers to a furnace where the ions expand into hydrogen gas, which cause the 20-micrometer-thick layer to shear off. A metal backing is applied to make it less fragile (and highly flexible, as you see on the right), and the remaining silicon wafer is taken back to the particle accelerator for another dose of ions. At a tenth of the thickness and with considerably less wastage, it’s easy to see how Twin Creeks can halve the cost of solar cells.

According to Technology Review, ion beams have been considered before, but particle accelerators were simply too expensive to be commercially viable. This is the flip side of Twin Creeks’ innovation: It had to make its own particle accelerator which is “10 times more powerful” (100mA at 1 MeV) than anything on the market today.

Solar cell will boost 400 percent by HyperSolar concentrator

HyperSolar is developing a breakthrough technology that magnifies the power of the sun to significantly increase the power output of solar cells.

Using innovative photonics and low-cost manufacturing processes, HyperSolar is developing the world's first thin and flat solar concentrator for standard solar cells. Applied on top of solar cells, the low-cost HyperSolar concentrator can increase solar cell power output by as much as 400%.

By adding the HyperSolar concentrator, manufacturers can use significantly fewer solar cells in the production of solar panels and dramatically reduce the cost per watt of solar electricity.

HyperSolar is developing a breakthrough technology to produce renewable hydrogen and natural gas using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. These renewable gases can be used as direct replacements for traditional hydrogen and natural gas to power the world, without drilling or fracking, while mitigating CO2 emissions.

NanoPower solar window production

Octillion announces NanoPower solar window production breakthrough

Charge your Battery with DIY 10 watt Solar Charger

This is a 10 watt photovoltaic charger with a 12 Ah battery. It is based on a Popular Science DIY article from July of 2008. Here are the specs:

10-watt photovoltaic (PV, aka solar-electric) panel:
Voltage: max. power 17.6V, open circuit 21.6V
Current: max. power 0.57A, short circuit 0.61A.
Pop Sci used a 5-watt panel, probably to keep costs down, but if I'm bothering to build it, I want to get more out of it! The charge controller can handle an even bigger panel, too.

Battery:: 12 amp-hours
4 amp charge controller:
Here is the spec sheet from the manufacturer: http://www.vellemanusa.com/downloads/6/sol4ucn2gbnlfresdpl.pdf. The charge controller keeps the battery from overcharging or discharging too deeply, both of which can ruin the battery.

Meter: The Pop Sci article used a 10A meter.

How to avoid Solar Panels Theft

solar panels (Photo credit: spanginator)

Recommended security measures include fencing, security fasteners, alarms and system monitoring tools, movement detection lights and even on-site security guards.

• Use ‘tighten-and-snap off’ anti-theft screws to fasten panels
• SolarInsure recommends using security lighting in the form of floodlights linked to motion sensors. 
• Build a reinforced concrete wall around the panel mountings, so preventing access to the supporting structure and its bolts.
• Mount panels on high poles wherever possible.
• Connecting wires to each panel in an array to form simple electrical loops is one solution used in both remote and urban installations. In case of a robbery, when the cables are cut, the current in the loops drops to zero enabling an alarm or trigger a message via a mobile transmitter.
• GridLock Solar Security has developed its own solar-specific packaged solution.
• Cameras, video and additional lighting, via a backup battery to ensure that the system will operate even if grid power is absent.
• A chip embedded in the panel communicates wirelessly with a central monitoring unit. California-based Tigo Energy has built security functions into its solar system management software that can send alerts to solar system owners when a panel is disconnected.
• Deploy an infra-red security barrier around the installation. This again can trigger alarms, lights or a mobile transmitter - and has the advantage of tripping before the thieves start to dismantle the modules.

Charging battery with solar panel

Bike Traveler With Folding Solar Panel (Photo credit: docentjoyce)

There is a simplest way to recharge your car battery with solar panel, connect the solar panel to battery terminals and wait. When the voltages on the meter reach near 14 volts the battery is fully charged. Now disconnect the solar panel to avoid overcharging the battery.

Please consult the battery manufacturer's data for guidance about how many amps the battery can handle, while charging and discharging. Some solar panels are made just for the purpose of maintaining batteries in vehicles that are parked a long time. They don't go over 13.5 or 14 volts and don't ever produce enough current to damage the battery. These you can just hook to your battery and forget.

DIY Guide for Installing Home PV Array Projects

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Dubai's solar energy project

Bankruptcy of 1,000-MW Blythe Solar Project

The stalled, 1,000-megawatt Blythe solar plant east of the Coachella Valley suffered setback as project developer Solar Trust of America filed for bankruptcy.

The Oakland-based company filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy — seeking to restructure its debts — in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, listing assets of up to $10 million and debts of up to $100 million.

The company's two main assets listed in the filing are the Blythe project and the 500-megawatt Palen solar project, which has awaited final approval from the federal Bureau of Land Management since June. Company officials were not available for comment Monday.

Solar power tower - Solution for free electricity

A solar power tower is a type of indirect solar power technology. Solar power is electricity produced from the radiation of the sun. The energy of the sun can be captured and converted intopower directly with Photovoltaic solar panels (PV) or indirectly by solar thermal conversion using Concentrated solar power (CSP) technology. [1] CSP technology uses thermal energy from the sun to heat a liquid, such as water or molten salt. This heat transferring liquid is used to vaporize water to the point of steam, which is then usedto generate electricity in a traditional turbine-generator. Power plants using CSP technology includeparabolic trough, parabolic dish and solar power tower systems.