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A small reflector around the back of the bulb would have both increased captured heat energy while blocking some of the wind that was taking away the heat.
cool setup to make usage of the sun for a sterling engine. but right, i was thinking something similar. i would consider a few optimisation in terms of energyloss. Moreover Energy is not equal to voltage. the interesting part is "how much power does it produce?".
Geologysts used umbrella and broken mirror pieces to make "giant spherical mirror" sun collector for cooking without fire. Solar power from 1 square meter is near 1kW, it was effective to boil water.
Using a decade resistor, you can determine the maximum power point(useful watts at various loads). Then you can change gear ratio's or even motor/generators and maybe eventually get it to do something useful, like power a radio or charge a battery. You really want solar tracking on that bad boy or you would have to re-adjust the lens way to often. Also, using carbon black to coat the inside of the tube would likely be more effective. Great job by the way.
You cant paint the inside of the tube, or put anything in it. The displacer, which is like a piston, but loose fitting, or with holes in it to allow the working gas to pass through/around, is located in that tube and uses it as its cylinder. Painting the inside would create too much friction. also, you couldnt do anything with the empty space at the end of the tube because a stirling engine needs the displacer to not go all the way to either end of the cylinder.
+1 Read my mind; was thinking literally the exact same thing the whole time I was watching this. MythBusters did one exactly the same way when they did the roman death ray myth. It didn't work for them, but I always thought it would work great with some fine tuning. On a side note, rear projection TVs have biblical sized Fresnel lenses in them.
I liked, very nice. I think that will be a lot more efficient if the solar collector (glass part) will be painted in the inside instead of the outside. That way the hottest surface of the glass will be inside instead outside... more heat to your machine and less heat lost to the outside air.
I like all the work you did. I am a machinist as well. Recommendation: Make a larger bracket for the lens that mounts to the extruded aluminum frame rather than the engine.
You had something that worked .... And then to change one bit meant there was no going back. Its cool how you kept going to get the final result... Fantastic
Ok, so considering the square footage of collection and the lens, head, mechanical, and generator losses you probably have a max of 3-3.5w to play with. If you can spin the gen head faster you can essentially better match the impedance of the system and alongside a shroud around the Stirling head you could very well get your output power to the level where a boost converter could charge a phone. I personally would replace the generator head with a 12v DC motor that has strong cogging. Anyway, with a few tweaks you just might be able to pull 10w out of that rig.
@@stopthephilosophicalzombie9017 I mean it in the sense that when you try to turn the shaft by hand you can feel that it doesn't want to leave it's current position, but once you get it to move it jumps to the next position. This means that the either the rotor or stator is an arrangement of strong permanent magnets. Being 3 years ago, I dont remember why I used that terminology instead of just saying "permanent magnet 12vDC motor", but it may be that the channel owner was using a salvaged motor and might only be able to identify the permanent magnet type the the feel of manually turning the shaft.
I have commented on using a Fresnel lens as well. After a few robotics and programming classes I was thinking about having the Fresnel lens track the sun, and also adjust the focus. I don't know how hot too hot is, but I've seen Fresnel lenses produce 3000 degrees F. They actually melted glass, metal, rock, etc.Granted they were huge lenses, but still. I had one that melted lead, and torched a 2x4 instantly, after putting it under the concentrated beam. If the Stirling engine was big enough, it could be geared down to perform some sort of work.
Whether useful or not, I really enjoyed watching the energy of the sun turned into mechanical movement and electricity. Solar panels convert solar energy to electricity more efficiently, but as a teacher, it gives me joy and inspiration to see the process with moving parts. Well done!
I dont really know english terminology of engines, but that thing you painted black (hot side?) ideally should be handled diffirently. In order to increase performance of sunlight, you must project light onto absolute black body that is hidden in absolute white body. That way heat will go away less quickly due to the fact that white body radiate less "radiant energy" (as we call it in my contry) and more "radiant energy" is absorbed by absolute black body. Long story short, paint place that lit by sunlight black, shadow side must be painted white, and in order to create model of absolutely black body you must place the surface a little bit lover that other "hot side's" surface in order to catch radiation reflected by surface by walls of said surface difference. Model of absolute black body presented in wikipedia's page named "black body"
There is a great community on this thread. I see a lot of comments about the efficiency and stating it would be better to just use a solar panel. In this case yes it would be, but that was not the point of this project. Nice work on what this engine is and thanks for the video. If people want better efficiency, then an engine that is designed for the purpose would need to be used. This engine is basically a toy or demonstration tool. It is not designed for efficiency. It is not designed to run continuously for a long time (it would wear out relativity quickly due to poor lubrication and bearing design). A better engine would cost more than PV panels though so there would need to be other reasons to bother. The main reason I see to create solar stirling is the ability to store thermal energy and use that energy after the sun is down. We don't have a good low cost electric energy storage medium (though batteries have improved significantly). There could be a small total efficiency gain as well, but the cost of such an engine wouldn't be justified over competing technologies.
The great thing about this video is that it shows that anyone with minimal skills can build this with just the basic tools, parts, equipment, and materials lying around the shop. My 12 YO son and I built this very same model and it only cost us 50 man hours and $300 in tools and materials to prove that a $50 Stirling engine made in China, and bought on Amazon, can be powered by a solar lens.
Johnny!! Forgive me, I don't wanna be "that guy".. but seriously no gloves while working with spinney things. I'm lucky I still have a hand. It happens quicker than you'd ever imagine. Brilliant work per usual!
nice, ordinarily stirling engines are powered by something burnt. if that burnt item has a gas component ie wood/wood gas then the potential for energy extraction is inefficient on a stirling. but the only use of solar other than a few specific wavelengths being usable in current photovoltaic cells is for the heat value of it. this is exactly what a sterling engine does best, use heat/cold temperature differential.
How much load can it take before it stalls? You have to draw power from the generator for it to offer mechanical resistance, multimeters are designed so that they have as little influence on the circuit as possible while taking a reading. Put a variable resistor and current meter across the generator and dial up the resistance until the engine is at the edge of stalling, note the current, then disconnect the resistor and measure that value. I^2R = power.
I've always wondered weather or not charging a typical USB device would stall a small Stirling Engine out, and if so, how big would it need to be/how much fuel it would need to make charging a device actually practical.
Great video really, but i got a tip for you the technic for any hand saws is to use the full length of the blade, less moves, less energy, quicker cut. ;)
Not 1... BUT 2 VIDEOS!?!! HELL YES Edit: anyone who is better at the math then I am, willing to try and take a stab at seeing what efficiency that is getting?
We need to know the current as well as the voltage. Power in watts equals Voltage times Current --> P=VI, also the area of the Fresnel lens is needed. Some assumptions need to be made. A general agreed upon number of watts per square meter on earth is about 1000 W/m^2. Also if we assume that the lens is perfectly focused on the Stirling engine then its just a matter of dividing the output of the engine by the input from the area of the Fresnel lens.
Andrew Malaty would you also need to figure the type and amount of fuel used to heat the lens? Than subtract that from the total out put of the generator? On the first video Sterling engine. Im not a electrical engineer. Just a mechanic.
I'm not sure what you mean by "heat the lens". If you are looking for efficiency of the system with solar power as the input then all you need is output/input. In fact the power from the sun is much higher than 1000 W/m^2 but a lot of energy is lost in the atmosphere. at the surface of the earth its close to 1000 W/m^2 on a sunny day. if we know the input which is the amount of power hitting the Fresnel lens, and the output which is the voltage times the current, we don't care about whats happening in between (as long as no more energy is being inserted into the system). Edit: Also not a electrical engineer, just a mechanical engineering student in final year.
Andrew Malaty in the first video, the Sterling Engine has a lens tube on the head of the engine. There is a fire the heats the collector to heat the air to run the engine. There has to be a fuel that is used to create the flame. The cost of the fuel, the amount of fuel burned and the wick burn rate expended to maintain the flame are all part of the energy expended to create the voltage or current to power the LED. All that information is needed to figure out the coefficiencie of the system. Is the energy expended to power the generator for the light greater or less than the amount of power the LED uses to light up?
I was discussing how to calculate efficiency of the system he built here in this video not the one in the previous video. For a flame powered system you would need to know the energy that is released from the chemical reaction of the fuel burning and compare that to the energy that the system produces. It would be interesting to see how the efficiency of these two systems compare.
With concentrated solar like that you have to constantly adjust it to keep it aligned with the sun but if you made a bigger engine and used a solar water heater the solar collector would not have to move to produce power all day.
Great video. I noticed you painted your little test-tube-thingy black on the outside - but it's not likely to be a good conductor of heat. I think it'd work better with an unpainted tube, with something black-metal inside.
one of the most aesthetically pleasing solar stirling engine builds on youtube. kudos to your hardwork. what if you built a bigger stirling enginer using your lathe? larger bore, more cc bigger generator motor.............. just wow.
و مَن يقوم بتغيير وضع العدسة مع تغير مكان نقطة تجمع حرارة الشمس..؟. كما إننا سننحرم من توليد الكهرباء في الليل و داخل المنازل.. فالإختراعات و تطويرها و تحويرها لتسهيل حياة الناس و ليس لتعقيدها.. فالتصميم الإول في الصندوق هو الأفضل و الأسهل. و لكن خبرتك الفنية و عددك و أدواتك تستحق الإعجاب و التقدير 👍👌👏.. فإستخدمها بإتجاه التسهيل و ليس التعقيد..
Use the giant lens from a projector tv. See how much power you can make with that. Maybe go further by adding water cooling to the cylinders so it can operate at a better temperature differential.
Надо сделать так что-бы площадь нагрева была больше ввиде перевёрнутой пирамиды из металла, чёрного цвета! И идентичную холодную часть поставить на землю, прикрыв её от солнца! Солнце греет, земля охлаждает! Нижнюю часть можно поставить в тазик с водой, либо закопать! Но тогда Стирлинг нужен аппазитного типа!😊
My 12 years old kiddo said to write this for you: "mister, you could make a curved lens to avoid having to focus the fresnel lens when the sun moves". Dang. I guess he got that from his mom...
Hi JohnnyQ90 I was wondering where you get your aluminum and brass round stock for making parts on your lathe. I have a foundry that I use to melt down aluminum into cylinders which works but sometimes the stock will have very tiny gas bubbles that formed when it was cooling making the surface full of very tiny pot holes even after they are machined into a perfect cylinder. Thank you, Chris
try adding oxygen scavengers (materials which capture oxygen and precipitate out to the surface, forming slag), and flux to your ladle during melting to remove other dissolved impurities, as they don't 'burn off' in the heat, enough will dissolve into the melt to cause lots of problems down the road. and as lock picker said, a controlled cool will solve a lot of internal porosity problems. your flux and oxygen scavengers should handle the rest of the problems. best of luck with future ladles of aluminum.
This is brilliant idea, now if you scale up the engine part so it can move bigger alternator and improve the Sun & Wind blowing on that bulb can really increase the power & efficiency and can do away the need to go for solar panels. This mechanism at least delivers CLEAN (I would go to say 99% clean) energy compared to Solar panel which are made from / by toxic substances and much difficult to recycle unless you have appropriate recycling services available in your area. Great job I will say here. 👍👍
a couple suggestions- replace the glass hot end with one made of copper. You can then oxidize that copper with liver of sulfur to get a rather decent selective solar absorber- it will dramatically improve your efficiency as copper's high thermal conductivity will make heat transfer into the working fluid more efficient. You could also try tweaking the moment of inertia of the flywheel, and if you really want to get fancy you can impedance match your load.
Were the telescopic poles measured so that the fresnel lens' optimum focal point met the black cylinder? When you burned the wood, the lens seemed to be much closer to the wood than the lens was to the cylinder. If your object isn't meeting the lens' focal point, the solar heat created by the fresnel lens isn't going to impress. I would have loved to see you hold the lens to the cylinder just as you did with the wood before you mounted the lens on the poles. Side note: Your work is AWESOME! That is the prettiest little solar engine I've seen on RU-vid. Well done sir.
johnny, it's nice to finally see people using the cheap Fresnel Lens/diy aqua lens , now you are loosing a lot of heat to the convection of the open air, make a generic concave mirror to attach to the back of the glass heat tube so as to shield the localised wind and also help concentrate the light better and you will get better dissipation, also replacing the painted glass tube with a *dark ceramic tube will increase the average internal heat even more, especially if you direct the light/heat to the inside of the tube and place the stopper inside the tube rather than the end. oc throwing away that crummy thing called a generator as supplied with the unit and replacing it with even a generic 12v DC stepper motor running in generator mode will also make more power as even this tiny alpha-type stirling should be able to drive much better slow speed generator/turbines. OC a better suited beta-type with magnetic coupled drive would work better here. * something as simple as a Dairyshop Fish Ceramics Tube Hiding Cave, Shrimp Crab Live Plant Shelter Breeding for Aquarium Fish Tank Ornament Decor tube £2.49, ゅ Material: Ceramic. Size: app.4.8cmx1.5cm/1.89''x0.59'' ゅ Ideal for furnishing fresh water aquariums should work fine...
Well, I expect this won't make any reasonable amounts of power considering the heat energy it gets. But 1.45 V is absolutely meaningless anyway, since the energy (watts) is the voltage times the current, which you didn't measure, I guess we can assume it makes around10 mA for the LED at an unknown forward voltage of the LED. But 1.45V * 0.01A would be 0.0145 watts, which is relatively useless unless you only want to power a single LED, a clock or whatever... But it's nowhere near the 5V * 0.5A (2.5 Watts) a regular smartphone would need for slow charging for example. So I would suggest using a solar panel, it uses less space and probably gives you at least 20 Watts for the same surface area, which would be over 1000 times as much power. ;-)
Also, this is concept. It can be scaled up. I’ve also seen a steam engine generator using a fresnel lens. It’s a good illustration of skills for budding engineers. 😀
Better yet, layer the systems. Transparent solar panel in front of the lens takes the uv part of the spectrum for electricity directly, but lets the rest pass through for conversion to heat and subsequently to electricity. Scale up for useability, of course. Or screw converting light to heat/electricity, instead convert it to calories; feed plants with it, particularly the kind of plants that can feed you right back.
Hahaha, all those fancy power tools, and yet you're stuck cutting aluminum rail by hand with a hack saw?? That's great lol. You have so many tools that I wish I had, but in this case, I think I have one you need for a change! lol
Try covering the sides of that pyramid shape (the arms holding the lens) with some foil to trap the light and to give some cover from the wind, which may have a cooling effect.
Just a suggestion: the stirling engine is mainly driven with the temperature. Higher temperature on hot side and take more heat in cold side. Maybe make a set of mirror to gain more sun energy instead of using lense. And make a better heat sink on cold side
A solar powered stirling engine that used solar power to start up in the morning then ran on its own through the night with a cool down cycle two hours before sun rise for maintenance would be a cool new way to generate electricity. 😊
a parabolic reflector concentrating the light onto a heat absorber on top of the hot engine part and an old kitchen clock as tracking motor to align the thing to the light source.
Crazy thing about this was that the design&production models were built around the turn of the 19th century and was mass deployed in North Africa until the gasoline&engine became more profitable displacing this technology.
Great project. Maybe you could make a dual engine by adding another Stirling engine? Making the lens heat up both engines efficiently would be a challenge though.
The project is wildly cool, but there’s something hilarious to me about the clips where your hands are shown and it’s slightly sped up so you move at inhuman speeds lmao
Maybe you can make a Sterling powered hacksaw! Just a thought. It's not the size of the lens, its the Focal ability. Try using a standard Magnifying glass and see what the power outcome is. Or would that be too much heat?
Nice. paint the displacer instead of the exterior glass and you will get a little more power out of it. The heat doesn't have to cross the glass as heat but instead crosses into the engine as visible light, then is absorbed in the hot space. Air flow over the hot displacer give you the heat transfer into the air.
U can configurate the circuitry to enable the small engine to help support more 🔋......i would not jus rely on just the engine to supply all of the help. U can use control boards ...capacitors. Jewel thiefs. Another solar panel to help boost the voltage and wattage. Having circuitry of lithium batterys or more panels in series or parallel. Jus by that little engine it can make a higher supply of wattage and voltage accessible. Thanks for the vid. I enjoy watching.
Change your magnification material to a lens with greater quality, you’ll get better results and more efficiency but the power on that system is finite means the physic structure is limited power flow. Overall I loved that work
Hi, I'm trying to do my own type of Stirling engine for multiple purpose. My suggest is use Hidrogen like working gas inside the engine. To do so, you sould add 2 gas valves like to inflate tires, in the fist add gas hidrogen an the other extrac air to remove air gas for replace ir with hidrogen. This gas is much better transmiting heat than air gas. Try to isolate the heat transfer between the heat piston and the cold one using ceramic material. Use a material like aluminum scourer inside betten the 2 pistons to make a heat feedback and upgrade the efficency. I'm making a special mechanism that strictly respect the stirling engine in all the cycle, I'll use a pair of cylinder shirt with aeration fins and the conection betten the cylinder, I'll use ceramic or isolated heat material. Hope that could help. Good luck
Nice work! If you need more power and speed just use a Calcium-Silicate (or other thermo shield material)shield around the hot side with a front glass onto the black tube to stop the wind's cooling effect. Congratulation!
Really cool build! Have you thought about solar motion tracking using electronics? Also just out of curiosity, why did you decide to drill and tap into the extrusion as opposed to using t-nuts/corner brackets for faatening? Keep it up!
