The Third Installment of the Epic 3D Printed Stirling Engine Design Project. Episode #1: • The Stirling Engine Pr... Episode #2: • The Stirling Engine Pr... Facebook: / leos.bag.of.tricks
No it's not crazy saga! Sterling engine alone can't save the world but this kind of stuff videos of yours gonna save the world. Thanks for your dedication.
I hope you haven't completely forgotten about this addiction...My father was a commercial radio Engineer, with a "First Phone" Liscence that was 30 years old, at his demise. I myself had a sleave covered with "A S E" certs a life time ago, B4 I was sucked into the world of Automotive Competetion. Mechanicaly, this thing looks awesome...and I observed a few details that I feel could simplify/stabilize some of your issues. Please, I hope...you consider opening this bag of worms again. I am subbed and hope to see more.
“I just poked at it until it worked, and then edged away.” You said that with some embarrassment, but that’s how I live my life. Which is why you should make the videos.
Stirling engines might very well safe the world. They are the best way of converting waste heat in energy. They have many applications and if you can make a small one for the home it would be one step towards this future. Please keep going but at least share the 3D models with all of us.
Closed cycle Brayton turbines are highly competitive with Stirling engines. Conserving the rotational momentum of a turbine seems inherently more efficient than yanking a piston head back and forth. NASA has done a lot of research in this area, particularly in the 1-10 kW power range. Highly recommend reading some of their free published papers which detail these experiments!
@@astebbin Yes I agree turbines on a larger scale are way better as of today. However they are big, costly and difficult to manufacture with many moving parts. Thermoacoustic stirling engines on the other hand have basically zero moving parts and can be very cheap, however more research is needed in this field.
Finally I found someone who gets what's a Stirling engine is all about. I always try to explain it to my dad, but he just don't gets it, it's a special Stirgling vibe, you know
Have you considered using a electric heating element to heat up the hot end? It seems like that would give much more fine control for tuning the engine. A small heating mantle and a pid controller would be a very easy setup to implement and control.
Yes, there are cheap band heaters on aliexpress. You can also use 3d printer hot end heater elements. Especialy if you want to make the engine more efficient it helps a lot if you can fine regulate the temperture and the amounth of watts that you put in the engine.
One company on Ebay sells fine oil free 316 stainless steel wool as well as thicker stuff. I find it lasts much longer and maybe cuts down on volatile residue in the working parts. I got tired of the wool degrading. Anyway, you might like the Lustersheen 316L, average fiber width .002".
Reynolds number describes the difference between the fine steel wool and the potscruber. I also have noticed the phantom power surge associated with the steel wool.i believe you are correct in describing that phenomena as internal combustion. I have used poster board, Elmer's glue, fiberglass cloth, aluminum foil and plaster Paris in the development of a light weight displacer. I have thoroughly enjoyed your video, maybe I offered some benefit to your endeavor. Great inventing.
Here's a comment to feed the Elle Goo Rhythm and your Stirling Engine Addiction. I'm really excited for part four. Hopefully it comes soon because otherwise I might start building my own.
You say at 12:52: "Sterling engines are not going to save the world". I think they will contribute to the salvation of the world. So keep up the good work and i will follow your saga with interest.
Absolutely lovely video. I actually believe that sterling could mean a lot in a renovable energy world. After all thermal storage is good and scales better.
I really love the openess about the struggle, which is something I totally recognize in my projects. Glad to see people with way more experience have it too :). Keep it up!
Eccellent work Leo! I work with eddy current dynos in the automotive test sector. Great to see the same technology applied on a slightly smaller scale!
Great video! I love your Stirling Engine Project. I love to see your mistakes and your idea to fix them. As a mechanical engineer, I understand the thermodynamics of it, but in uni, I missed the optimization steps you are mostly talking about.
Hi Leo. I admire your work and perseverance along your journey. I'm also captive by Sterling engine. They are great discovery and they're many enthusiastic persons all around the world, but not with your passion. Thanks. Jacques from Quebec.
My addiction took the path of trying to simulate stirring engines in murtiphysics software. I got...not very far! But, considering how many degrees of freedom any actual physigal carnot cycle engine enjoys I still think we need to be able to run it in software for optimization. A la Ricardo. Your videos are great!
There may be far too much dead space volume inside the regenerator. I believe a stirling needs the vast majority of its volume on either side of the displacer and in the driven piston volume. I think the engine needs 1/8th of that volume of steel wool, the rest should be sealed off, air tight.
Amazing content, I've been looking for something like this on stirling engines for ages. There's 3D printing, some nice graphs, perfomance testing. Same story, I've fallen in love with this engine concept the first time I saw it..
Hi Leo, I just wanted to send a quick thanks to you for your RU-vid contributions. I was rummaging for information on sterling engines and stumbled upon your channel. Having found it fabulously educational and entertaining I immediately subscribed. RU-vid has a big appetite for genuine, sincere, mad genius and you fit the bill. In that vein, I'd strongly recommend another Leo who's building a boat (Sampson Boat Co - Talley Ho). Like you he seems to have started his RU-vid journey as a passion but over time has amassed a huge following and now has his work funded through his patreon subscribers. Just a though, as it seems you too might find good success with your channel. Anyway best of luck from us here in Berkeley California
yup made something from a Coleman lantern globe,,, cylendar 4"dia. as the bottom and a tomatoes can piston. and it ran! was 10yr ago. and im back. and hooked. aa did help me once. consider kids selling upcycled art at farmers markets as parlor toys. they could run in a south facing window. kid gets to college. How about a pilates ball displacer. Yard art. Glad you presented this theme so well. Wanna trade a banjo for a dyno? Good vibes to you
I love the idea of Stirling engines! This project has been really fun to follow so far. I'm subscribing so I can keep up with it. You're doing great, this is very entertaining! I'm hoping to build a big one someday, my parents just had a firepit put in and I thought it could be a cool heat source. Good luck on your upgrades!
1. Love your work, man! I'm looking for stirling engines materials since I was in high school. Your channel is so underrated. 2. Replace the plastic rombic drive parts with metal ones. I know, it's gonna make the whole 3D printed engine void, but you should have a visible increase in power! 3. Try using some automotive grade rubber for the working piston membrane. 4. Try using more tight tolerances and constant greasing of the piston shafts. It's hard with this configuration, but you're a genius guy and you'll find out a solution for that. 5. Have you considered presurizing the engine? I know, with all those printed parts it could not handle the pressure very well, but give it a try.
You should put a second tachometer magnet in the gears, but rotate the gear with the second magnet 180 degrees so that the two magnets are never in close proximity with eachother. You could also build *four* optical tachometer sensors. When you combine these things, you can get much smoother data. Maybe you can even take it a step further and eliminate a lot of the noise by using polyborbornene mounts and stuff! (And also, some graphite and teflon lubricant mixed into some silicone grease.) Lastly, stick with the diaphragm, but use a thin steel diaphragm or something. Much more durable, and much higher coefficient of restitution.
The dynamometer looks like a great success. You can now gleen all the juicy metrics that will allow you to tune your design which is a very useful way to be deterministic in your approach and get immediate feedback. This design gives me hope. I can't recall if you said, but are you targeting RPMs or constant torque? I keep imagining this design being useful for a metal roof-mounted ceiling fan motor to ease the work of air conditioning by recirculating air.
Great video Leo. I encourage you to re-design and optimize but I do fully understand the burn-out and how much blood, sweat and gears you've invested. When I first go into Sterling engines, I soon realized that even past the amount of fine-tuned tweaking, that ultimately professionals have never made them perform to the level of replacing anything we current use today. It was a sad conclusion because other than a few really niche applications, as neat as they are it's just a no-go...
Hi Leo, I’m very interested in where you have got to with this. I understand that life gets in the way. I’m trying to renovate a house and that’s taking longer than expected. I’m looking forward to the next iteration - I saw the short video.
Even if it not produce a lot of power that was a really interesting journey. I love the way you present and analyce the data obtained, specialy on the strange spike of power. Hope that the proyect don`t end here, is a lot of work but seems that you enjoy the process of making and learning from it. Some day i want to make my own Stirling, and people like you give a lot of inspiration. Greetings from Argentina!
I think it's safe to say that the objective here is not in the finished product. This project is about having fun solving problems and you seem to be enjoying it? and its fun to watch :D
Suggestion for vibrational noise. Change piston travel from vertical to diagonal. Would there be any chance that a stirling engine could function on the thermal differential from inside an attic to outside air on the north side of a home?
Hi! My name's Ian and I'm a... well, thought I got over the addiction about 10 years ago but thanks to your channel I'm contemplating going down that rabbit hole again! Will be on a larger scale this time. Instead of a rubber damper between the colliding crank parts, why not a little piezo element to harness (and maybe measure) all that wasted percussive energy? ;-) Really enjoyed the triptych 👍
I too had similar ideas to this, but through circumstances, there is not even a first prototype, and, unlikely to be happening in the near future, so, I will share my thoughts. What about using this engine to improve the efficiency of a diesel generator (could be petrol, I just like diesel) you mount the hot end of two of your engines in the exhaust gas of a generator. your engines being horizontally opposed should cancel out much of the vibration. an internal combustion engine running at peak torque would have a jet of flame out of the exhaust manifold to replace your gas torch.
Hi Leo, great striling engine project you got there especially because it's mostly 3dprint . I've too fallen in the youtube can stirling engine rabbit hole, but never actually tried to build one! I was about to suggest using a prony brake setup, to extract the actual mechanical power curve you have at the output axis, maybe with a bike disk brake, a leather belt some or thing like that, but I've seen you discarted this idea in the second video. I once used this setup with a motobike brake, strain gauge and rpm sensor to measure the mechanical power of a microhydro turbine. It worked like a charm.
Super nice episode.. I do want to try to build one myself as well...actually instead of redesigning it, if it would be possible to pre-pressurize (possibly with helium) the chamber where the piston is, the W and efficiency will raise exponetially.. and make the engine interesting in terms of energy collected. Congrats on the project 💪🏻
I hope the saga will continue some day ;) I enjoyed it very much so far, I hope it's not the end. And I like the way you collected data. I think some kind of "thermal shield" or "thermal chamber" for hot area of the engine can greatly contribute to quality of the result
Hi, I guess that the air leakage introduce the stopping of the machine. You see the torque become high and high then go to a plane. I think it means the internal air presssure go to higher and may lead to air leaking some where.
The other day i saw a video about a college researching near isothermal stirling heat pump to replace vapor compression style heat pumps. It probably isn't useful to your design, but i found it interesting.
Mettre des aimants et une bobine cuivre sur une roue qui tourne grâce au moteur stirling est une bonne idée mais on peut aussi ajouter des aimants fixés aux pistons qui font des va et vient à l intérieur d une bobine cuivre pour créer de l électricité. Cependant l électricité créée avec les pistons et avec la roue ne sera de même nature il faudra donc harmoniser les 2 types de courants électriques créés en 1 seul courant électrique reutilisable.
Thanks Leo for your amazing job!!! I'm doing some researchs by my own for build electricity at home and magenitcs and stirling engine catch my attention long time ago. I would like to follow your path, are out there some books to learn the principles of mechanics and using cad to know how to build my own devices? Would you mind to share the data to print it and rest of spare parts?
Use an electrical heat source, something like an electrical heating plate. Hear me out, its very repeatable heat source, always the same heating, easy and save to experiment with since no flame, and it will help you calculate the performance depending on the energy use of the heat source.
Neat project. I think it's worth it incidentally, stirling engines are a really simple way of converting heat back into more usable energy. If you could work out a way to easily print them in a range of sizes I can think of all kinds of uses it'd have.
