Hi all,
Fantastic thread and couldn't help but read the while thing! I hope some of you are still out there
I too am edging my way into some of the practical problems facing developed and developing nations. I have my own projects that I am working on, and cannot wait to get a prototype up and running.
I feel like any day now I will read about someone who has just completed trials. It would not be the first time I have "invented" something just by looking at the needs and working through the
problem - just to find that it has already been done.
The reason I am putting this up is not to draw attention to myself, but to explain that I love multi faceted design work and would be more than happy to be involved in your discussions. This area
hold particular interest for me not only because is a good thing to do, but because there are so many competing factors; political, logistical, technical and environmental.
For the problem at hand,
Catherine and other in the field - I would like to hear more about the reasons your projects struggled. It does not sound like it was purely technical at all.
I found the question about building a massive unit even though power expectations were low, interesting. No takers? What is it that limits building a large engine? In regular internal combustion
terms you add more cylinders and increase displacement to increase power (and fuel consumption) but provided that you could supply enough heat to the hot side what else stops a large unit from
producing usable power?
Could I also suggest that heat flow cannot be described in terms of temperature either. That is only part of the equation. Temperature is the effort that overcomes the resistance - in this case
the thermal conductivity of the material the engine is made from. A thermal gradient builds up across the material and passes its heat to the working fluid and so on, which you would all be
familiar with. A very wise and cunning engineer I used to work with once compared a massive LPG burner we were using and an acetylene torch we used to light it. The torch was much hotter, but the
LPG burner was producing much more HEAT...
The thing that gets me is that making the engine bigger in this regard actually helps by giving you a greater surface area to transfer heat to/from (can't forget the from)... What am I missing?
Anyway, thanks for the great read, I will be spending a lot more time around these pages. Great to see like minded people out there. Only crazy if you're alone right?