Stirling engines used to generate electricity from wood burning stoves

[bptdude___2569]

I wrote a nice email to:

http://www.stirlingpowermodule.com/

The Stirling CHP for wood pellets will be available in 2009. I asked for availability date and price, when they are ready to release such. I will let people here know, when I hear from them.

It may be a long time, but it may not be so long. The ST-5 is due out for prime time hopefully this year too. And there are a couple of others.

I am very hopefull it will be soon we have something usefull.

Even if the electric company won't buy back all my electricity I could make, I could just use a lot more electricity to make hydrogen for my car, and then just use the Stirling to pay back the electric bill. This makes the electric company a kind of virtual storage bank for energy, until they figure out how to stop people from doing this.



- Joe

[matt___6743]

This is a Project I have been thinking about doing I own a Machine Shop and Foundry but the research on a Stirling engine and drawing up the project on cad is what im missing if all that is required on this project is CNC machine parts it cant be all that expensive to build nor labor intensive to commercial Produce. ive been looking at models and diagrams of the engine its pretty simple.

Matt Schindler
Matt@Microshaped.com
www.Microshaped.com

[stan.hornbaker]

Matt: To the best of my knowledge there are no CAD or any other type of plans to make a power producing Stirling engine available. Many similar requests similar to yours have been received. It is regrettable that it is simply not possible.

If you will go to the home page of Stirlingengine.com and click on the book "How I Built a 5-HP Stirling Engine" it will take you to a page where you can download Chapt. 6 of the book and see what that engine looks like during both construction and operation.

Building, or providing kits of parts for building Model Stirling engines would by an alternative but you would have to have one with a unique appeal to be profitable in todays market.

[cchagnot]

The engine that Merrick Lockwood wrote his book about was originally designed by Sunpower
Inc. The first Prototype was built by Sunpower and delivered to Bangladesh where Merrick
lived at the time. It was part of a USAID funded project administered by the Asia Foundation
in Bangladesh. Merrick was the Asia Foundation project manager. The engine described in
the book that Merrick finally ended up with was very different from the original Sunpower
Engine. Just a little history of where that engine started from.

Catherine

[bptdude___2569]

Matt:

For the serious Strling engine builder, as you seem to be, here is a couple of things I read, that repeat, though I have not learned these myself the hard way.

1. - What metals and materials can your foundry and machine shop deal with ? The hot end of a power producing engine has to get very VERY hot to produce practical work. There is an issue with metal staying hot like that. This is a problem that does not have an equivalent in internal combustion engines.

2. - Please don't forget the cold end. This is more my pet peave than general wisdom, but still, find a way to cool the cool end as best can be cone.

3. - You will want to compress the air or gas you use inside the engine. Not sure how you want to do this, but it is almost required to compress the air to exagerate the effect of the Stirling compression/temperature activity. This will help you get usefull power out. Even the Stirling brothers had to do this in their later engines that did factory work so famously.

4. - Remember you will be building a beast that is large, klunky, heavy, and will like to chug at a constant speed. It will have low horsepower for size, compared to say your Honda lawnmower. What YOU will have is a machine that can run continously, hopefully, like just run forever. Small internal combustion engines are cool, but do not have the design to run continously like this.

Best of luck to you.

- Joe

[jpmcarcoll]

In the business section of the ALBANY TIMES UNION, (Albany,NY) dated Saturday, April 11, 2009, "Waste Heat Converter Company gets first Order" Schenectady - Ener-G-Rotors, Inc which makes devices that turn waste heat into electricity, has received the first order for its 50-Kilowatt system. Harbec Plastics, base near Rochester,,,etc." I Googled ENER-G-ROTORS,INC., and sent both their Sales and Technical departments inquiries on their products. I have not had any responses as yet, but it sounds like they have mastered the Stirling Engine. Joe.