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Seems like it's just converting electromagnetic energy into pressure, and then focusing that pressure. Kinda like a a car's windows, except directed.
Ingeneous and simple, I like it!

It's technologies like this that might help save our asses....
I kinda wish we didn't live in a world where a few nuclear warheads can fuck the situation straight to hell....

Marshall Brain is now championing this - has anyone done an honest EROEI calculation and is there consideration regarding the availability of the materials used?

http://marshallbrain.blogspot.com/2005/ ... cient.html

Marshall Brain is now championing this - has anyone done an honest EROEI calculation and is there consideration regarding the availability of the materials used?

Has anyone done an honest EROEI calculation?

Solar is very easily done with positive energy return. (Or energy ratio above one depending on your definition) Its just big mirrors, and you can make those easily enough, maybe plastic covered mylar.

The problem is paying people to build and lay the stuff down... this can get rather expensive. Maybe when we replace most labor in the field with robots.

I found this unit online:

http://www.baileycraft.com/solar4.htm

An 18 in. parabolic reflector theoretically captures about 160 W of sunlight maximum. If the Stirling motor is 30% efficient, then you could possibly get as much as 50W out of the unit, making it about $5/W.

Perhaps a larger parabolic reflector might get more, but I'm sure any given engine will experience diminishing returns.

I like the simplicity of this unit, the fact that it will attach to a photographic tripod, etc... I just wonder how easy it would be to remove the flywheel and attach a small electric generator.

Caoimhan

Bandidoz wrote: has anyone done an honest EROEI calculation

The concepts of "honest" and "EROEI" are not allowed to be used together.

There are three types of lies.

1) Damn lies
2) Statistics
3) EROEI

I've clicked on a couple of the links and I'm none the wiser. Why is this Stirling Engine such a big deal?

Please could someone explain in short non-technological sentences for those of us with an arts background.

I'm sure I could design a nice colour scheme for the darn thing, if I only knew what it was

Stirling engines aren't that big a deal. They can be theoretically efficient, but you will get more real world losses with them for big power cycles than a similar steam cycle for large power plants.

But what they do do well is work on low temperature differentials, and they have good efficiencies at low power systems. They can also be made with relatively few moving parts and no liquids that can freeze on you. So as such they are ideal replacements for RTG's for nuclear space power, decent for solar concentrators where the power is relatively low so a similar steam cycle would be less efficient. Or they can be used for a bottoming cycle of a power plant if you are worshiping the god of thermodynamic efficiency and have capital overflowing.

I feel we're more likely to use VMJ photovoltaic concentrators than stirling concentrators though, but if you can make the stirling engines cheap enough I suppose they'll be competitive.

nicklockard:

Im very interested in the technical knowledge behind building "solarsterlingengines". The first post explained how to make the dish out of fiberglass material but it left me with more questions than answers. The problem is that it was a guest who started this thread and cannot be reached other than through this method (=posting). So my question to you nicklockard, do you have a link or a website of your own which in clearer terms explains the process of building a prototype solar sterlingengine? If so, do you car to share it with us?

Hello,

I am interest in a Stirling engine with a good power but with a little extent
because it can increase my Otto efficiency from 20 to 40%.
Yes..., my exaust gases have an high temperature(about 400 °C) and they have the 40% of all my oil heat, and another 25% is in the radiator.
Is there someone who knows the existence of a little size Stirling engine(20 kw)?
I would have to introduce it in my car with an Otto engine(20 kw).........
My opinion is that it's possible.

Hi

I'm not sure what you would connect the output to...are you saying you are driving an electric car? The heat from the radiator or exhaust could run a sterling engine...but what would you do with the electricity it created?

Ron...

RonMN, it's not required that you hook up a stirling engine to a generator. It can be coupled mechanically, as well.

I think it's an interesting idea to make use of the second law of thermodynamics, although I don't know the feasability of any specific applications.

This news was big enough to make it to Slashdot!

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/0 ... 32&tid=137

Appearently this one plant will double the US's solar power production, and all without expensive high tech PV or massive towers of molten sodium!

Honestly, this looks like solar power tech thats as cheap and easy to build and mantain as common gasoline generators. Cool no?

Direct link to the article:

http://pesn.com/2005/08/11/9600147_Edis ... est_solar/

More from the company providing the dishes:

http://stirlingenergy.com/solar_overview.htm

Wow! Excellent news!

Does anyone know of a Home Sized system that might be available? Or how it might compare $/W with PV solar on that home sized scale?

Some serious good news for a change!

The articles say: 4500 acres, 500 MW. This is about 7 square miles, or about 71.4 MW per square mile. There's your figure for comparison with wind and solar photovoltaic, in terms of power output per unit of land area.

Tests conducted by Sandia Labs show the Stirling-cycle solar system to be about twice as efficient as other solar systems.

We have plenty of hot sunny desert just waiting to do something useful.

500 MW is in the size range of a small nuclear reactor. By the way, the Slashdot article has some interesting discussion of various reactor technologies.

For anyone who's interested in a working demonstration model of a simple Stirling-cycle engine, go here:
http://www.newenergyshop.com/htm/new_energy_shop_en.htm
and click on the link for Stirling models. If I'm not mistaken, there are a few other companies also producing small Stirling models for educational and demonstration purposes.

500mw is a real amount of power. I am impressed! Now what are all the doomers around here going to say? Still no liquid fuel solution. Well there's always hydrogen....

No, we would say 'How long will it take to build?'

The problem is that for the most part this technology is arriving too late to save consumer civilization. Oil is peaking right now and it will be years before just this one plant gets built. The stock market could crash next week. There needed to be a Manhatten project to deploy all these new technologies right now because now is when we need them.

How much will this cost? $ 1 billion would be a competitive price.