PDA

View Full Version : Stirling/APU competition




n/a
09-04-2002, 11:01 AM
While we are holding our breath, waiting for Kamen's stirlings, we are hearing news about potential competitors breathing down Kamen's neck. Recently Flibber on TIQ posted about a wheelchair powered by flywheels. Today I noticed an article about Micro Fuel Cell technology that promises to extend battery capacity from hours to months.

http://www.mhtx.com/technology/micro_fuel_cell/index.htm

A while back I have read about another firm that plans to mass produce stirlings at prices around 1K. but I cant find the original link. I suggest we gather and analize the info on the stirlings' potential competitors in this thread to get a good overview of what Kamen's stirlings will be up against.




n/a
09-04-2002, 12:44 PM
Here is the stirling manufacturer I have been looking for for a long time:

quote:Available Now: The First Low-Cost, Mass-Production Stirling-Based Engine

Omachron Technologies, Inc. is pleased to announce that it is now offering demonstration models of pre-production Conrad Heat Engines, derived from the Stirling engine, for powering consumer appliances such as vacuum cleaners, as well as lawn mowers, leaf blowers, portable electrical generators, battery chargers, bicycles, motor scooters, and small boats. During the fourth quarter of 2001, commercial sample engines will be offered for sale to companies interested in licensing this technology.

http://www.omachron.com/papers.html

Some specifications:

quote:Engine displacement
50 cc.
120 cc.
410 cc.

Power output
75 watts
189 watts
750 watts


1/10 hp
1/4 hp
1 hp

Engine RPM
1800
1800
1800

Operating pressure
45-60 psia
45-60 psia
45-60 psia

Weight (approx)
950 grams
1700 grams
3850 grams

Length
240 mm (9.5")
305 mm (12")
381 mm (15")

Width
89 mm (3.5")
102 mm (4")
165 mm (6.5")

Depth
89 mm
102 mm
165 mm

Typical Nox emissions*
less than 2ppm
less than 2ppm
less than 2ppm

Typical CO emissions*
less than 2ppm
less than 2ppm
less than 2ppm

Thermodynamic efficiency
22%
22%
22%

Production cost for 100,000 units, per unit
$22
$39
$89



* Using optional plasma burner and butane, propane or liquefied natural gas as fuel.


Somebody might want to past in those tables as they should be.

Those things do look affordable dont they, compared to Kamen's stirlngs for 1.5 K.

n/a
09-04-2002, 12:58 PM
An interesting posting from a Yahoo discussion group. The guy searched for the patents. Generaly the discussion group seemed sceptical that these people have managed what they claim.

quote:Subject: Omachron Announcement

Jumping in here (after being a listener for a while), I have to say
I'm impressed with the potential I see in this Omachron announcement -
not so much from their press release, but from what I dug up after
reading it. Their "About Us" page is filled with the usual
corporate rhetoric, but between Google searches and searching the US
Patent database, these folks appear to be everything they say they
are. I too am surprised that we've never heard of them before, but
that's no reason to doubt their expertise.

For example, go to the patent search page,
http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/search-bool.html. Type in "Wayne"
and "Conrad" and start reading the existing patents that turn up,
particularly the ones titled "Heat Engine". Larry and Wendy want to
see pictures. Simple. Go to http://www.alternatiff.com and download
the plugin that lets you view the patent drawings in your browser.
You'll see some *very* impressive Stirling engine technology
including sophisticated heat exchangers, unique displacer couplings,
variable phasing and dwell. It's clear that as engineers, these
people are no slouches.

Along with Hubert, I'd like to see them succeed. In fact I can't
wait. I've long been a believer in the real advantages of the
Stirling - near silent operation, few moving parts, multiple fuel
capablilties, low pollution, etc., etc. Until we can drive one, we
should at least cut some slack to these people trying to make leaf
blowers less obnoxious. Between them and Kamen, let's hope they
attract some sorely needed attention for this technology.

n/a
09-04-2002, 01:04 PM
Another view point regarding the Omachron stirling:

quote:Subject: Re: Omachron Announcement

Hello watchers of the OMACHRON announcement,
today I've had a short look on the patent's description of W.Conrad's
patent US6226990.
In my opinion, basically this is a free piston Stirling engine.
The novalty basically is, that he controls the piston- and the
displacer movements extra (separated!)
(by an electromagnetic arrangement). The opinion of the inventor is,
that by that he
can have discontinous and non-symetrical movements, which will enhance
the thermodynamical
efficiency(a parallel to the positive effects of my Moving Cylinder
approach).
So from that point of view Conrad's patent is a good approach.
Besides that Conrad's design is quite complex having quite a lot of
compounds,
(in the patents drawings) and besides that the engine needs an
electronical power
control which can handle the big magnetic force involved. So, in
general, the engine
is as much (or even more?(has to control the displacer, too!) complex
as a Sunpower free-piston-Stirling,
HAVING TO FACE THE SAME PROBLEMS AS for example heat transfer, dead
space, sealings vibration etc.
From looking at the patents text a am convinced, that such a design
will work,
BUT the question comes up in my mind:
What makes OMACHRON believe (?) to reach such a low prize (in future)
?
Or did I get anything wrong here ?

Any discussion/opinion on that, fellows ?

Hubert

charmed
09-04-2002, 03:46 PM
The pricing on the Omachron units (where are they?) seems even more hopeful than some of the quotes in the IT book proposal:-)

Nice finds, Lawrence. It's a very cuious business, these new energy technologies. One wonders what holds them back.

The stirling page on the Segway site hasn't been updated since it was created. Wonder where they are at with it.

Seeker
09-04-2002, 10:55 PM
Am I right in thinking that someone ( I believe Don C) at TIQ had mentioned a company which planned on selling small Stirlings for $100 ??

Maybe I've been sniffing too much fresh air lately ... ;)

Speaking of fresh air, I'm a bit dismayed to hear that my country (Canada) is planning in on buying in to the Kyoto accord. I'm all for cleaning up the environment and stuff, but I just wonder if there may be better ways of going about it then to enact measures which may stifle industrial growth. (Rather than dedicating your efforts to the development of 'green technologies'). I would like to see countries such as Iceland, which has recently committed itself to bringing about a 'hydrogen economy', being held up as a model of how to tackle the environmental issues which have commanded the world's attention.

What do you all think of the Kyoto Accord, and how it might relate to what Dean Kamen is doing ?

Seeker

Seeker
09-05-2002, 12:42 AM
Lawrence,

I thought you might be interested in this company, because of the Norway connection. By the way, I've got Norwegian and Swedish in my blood, myself. I really don't know much about the viability of their Stirling technology, but it sounds like they're interested in doing some of same things with Stirlings that Kamen is.

http://www.powerco.com/Power/hpu/hpufaq.html

Seeker

n/a
09-05-2002, 11:19 AM
One of the most detailed description Kamen has given of the his stirling is from the Cyberposium/ Harvard Business School Speech he gave earlier this year. Flibber just reposted it, without giving credit to those of us who transcribed that speech. Here is a vital segment of it. It is worth rereading and analyzing:
quote:"One of the problems, if we went
around the world with this thing to the places that really
need it, is where are you going to charge it up? So we
decided that it would be neat if the thing could be powered
and not have to be recharged. Well, therein lies the rub.
You couldn't put a standard gasoline or diesel or gas
turbine or any kind of engine in it. A, the pollution issue
and, b, the peak power this needs is extraordinarily high.
The average power it needs when it's just sitting here not
accelerating is very low. My power -- it would stand here
for 30 or 40 hours running these little processors. And the
only time it takes reasonable energy is when I ask the
motors to do something. So, that's ideal for an electric
system. You take a battery that has a high energy density
and a very, very high power density and you can make this
thing run. It turns out that it's very easy to get all the power
density we need. That's energy per unit of time for those
technically challenged among you. But it's very hard to get
enough energy density to carry enough energy with you to
really let it run all day or all week or all month. A lot of
acid batteries carry 10 watt hours of energy, 10 watt hours
of energy for every kilogram of battery. So go to nickel
cadmium. Well, that's 20, it's a factor of two. Go to nickel
medal high drive. That's 40 watt hours of energy, 40 watts
for one hour or one watt for 40 hours. You multiply your
power times your time you get the total stored energy.
Lithium ion batteries are 60 watt hours -- 600 percent over
lead. We're going in the right direction -- per kilogram of
lithium. 10, 20, 40, 60 watt hours per kilogram. A
kilogram of propane - 8,750. That's why you don't drive
electric cars. So, we definitely want an electric system
because it's smooth and it's quiet and it delivers the peak
power to run this thing around. And if we built an engine
that had enough power to do that, kilowatts it takes at
peak, you'd be running around this thing, you know, with a
great big engine on the end. But, if it's average
consumption is only 50 or 100 watts, why don't we have a
tiny little engine that could somehow convert some of that
8,750 watt hours of energy stored in a fossil fuel or a
propane or natural gas or cow dung or rice husks or corn
oil, anything that will burn, why don't we carry that energy
and find a way to turn it into electricity to triple charge the
batteries. I'll get the peak power that I need from the
batteries and for every kilogram of propane I carry I could
go from here to New York. Well, it's hard to do that with
an ordinary engine, the kinds that most people are familiar
with in your lawnmower. And they're noisy and they
pollute and, mostly, they need refined fuel and it's very hard
to get their pollution (inaudible). So we decided we'd go to
Sterling Cycle Engine. We don't have enough time today to
go through the whole Sterling Cycle Engine story, but
suffice it to say it's a close cycle engine. The fuel never
goes inside. Think of it as a little air conditioner
compressor or refrigerator compressor. The difference
between the engine in your car and your refrigerator at
home is the engine in your car runs about 20 or 30 minutes
a day and it needs a lot of maintenance and you change the
oil every few thousand miles and every few years you
throw it away. Your refrigerator runs pretty much 24 hours
a day for about 20 years and it never seems to go bad. So,
when you remodel your house, you put it in the basement
and let it run another 20 years. It's a closed system. It's
sealed. It doesn't have particulates going into it. It doesn't
have fuel exploding inside it, combusting, going through
cycles. It's sealed. You put electricity in, you get cold out
of one end of the compressor and hot out of the other. It
takes some energy to separate the two. That's that pesky
second law thing I was talking about earlier. Well, what if
you did that backwards? What if you took that closed
system and, instead of putting electricity in to get cold out
of one end and hot out of the other, supposing you put heat
in and you pulled electricity out? That's what we did when
we built this little Sterling Cycle Engine. It's sealed. It's got
30 atmospheres of helium in it. And since you're just
heating it externally, you could heat it with anything: Big
dish, the sunlight, literally any refined fuel you could think
of. Or put the hot end of it in a pile of cow dung and, as
long as you keep the hot end hot and the cold end cold, it
will make electricity. And we decided what if we could
scale one down small enough that you could clip it on here?
We decided to do that. We started spending lots and lots
of money about seven years ago doing that. Well, it might
work. I wish I could tell you it was one of those really
quick ideas, you know. But, it's not. It requires a lot of
different disciplines of engineering, a lot of tooling. I mean,
there is no conceivable way to make that one of those
really quick ideas. Well, the best we hoped to do, again,
not because the engineers are bad, but because the physics
is governed by that second law, if we can't get the hot end
of the engine to run at more than about 900 degrees C and
nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and there aren't a lot of
metals to let us to do that, and if we can't get the cold end
of the engine lower than the ambient temperature on earth,
which is about three hundred and something degrees
absolute, the difference between that 900 and that 300 say,
you know, the best you're going to do is between 30 and
40 percent thermodynamic efficiency. Trying to get
electricity out by putting heat in, most of what you're going
to make is more heat. Once you add the rest of the
practical realities, we'll probably come out at about 20
percent efficient at turning heat into electricity. But that's
about twice as good as any little engine you buy. The
reason the little engine's work is because there's just so
much energy at that 8,750 watt hours per kilogram that you
don't care that your lawnmower is 6 percent efficient. But I
care, so we said, okay. We've got 20 percent efficiency
out of that engine. What's the rest of it? Heat. But unlike
a typical engine where the air is coming in mixing with the
fuel, exploding and what comes out in that 80 percent, or in
their case 90 percent, that isn't useful work is not only heat,
it's contaminated heat, polluting heat, it's problematic. In
the case of the Sterling, you're heating in the top of this
thing but you're going to water cool the rest to keep the
bottom cold, so the heat's coming out as a high quality heat.
And since you're burning it not inside an engine in a
combustion cycle where you get these rapid explosions, but
as a continuous burn, in fact, it makes about as much
pollution when we burn most of the fuels we've been
playing with as your kitchen stove. You wouldn't put your
Buick in the living room and close the windows, but you
think nothing of turning on all those gas burners. It's fine.
So we make a lot less pollution and we can recover all that
heat, and it's clean, usable heat. What are you going to do
with that heat? Well, you'll be, I hope, depressed to know
that the number one cause of death on planet earth isn't all
that complicated. It's lack of drinkable water. Depending
on whether you believe the United Nations or the World
Health Organization, everybody has different numbers, but
nobody gets the number below 60 and some people claim
the number is 85,000 people per day are dying because
they have a choice between dying of having no water intake
or drinking the local water which has a substantial chance
of killing them, or leaving their whole village literally
contaminated in misery. I haven't seen on the horizon the
likelihood of large scale distributed water systems coming
to the rest of the world. It just shows you the power of
engineering. It's the most valuable thing that you ingest is
water. And if you do it right and you engineer it properly,
you can make that most valuable thing, which is not internet
bandwidth, it's water. But if you could take that valuable
thing and distribute it properly, it's so cheap that all of us
think nothing of going home, washing our car, letting the
hose run, let it (inaudible) on the highway, then picking it up
and drinking out of it. You don't need to go to a special
place for that 1.3 liters we need per day. It's so cheap we
flush our toilets with it, we wash our clothes, we just spray
it all over. And in most of the rest of the world about a liter
of it a day exceeds the capacity of the local environment so
85,000 people die. To me, you build a large scale
infrastructure so that the rest of the world have water like
we do and instead of typically women spending four hours
of their day trying to find it and move it to their family and
their children, and it weighs 62.4 pounds per cubic foot,
and you have to haul it out of the ground. Instead of doing
that, they should build an infrastructure. Well, it doesn't
seem to me that the business model is there to do that. So,
we have the little engine and it might make the
transportation more productive and more clean and more
efficient and more effective. What if that 80 percent that's
going off as heat could run through a vapor compression
distiller? What if we could do a coverall of that heat as we
let water go through a phase change? What if we could use
the waste heat that's cooling this engine to make any source
of water literally pure, distilled water? Well, to boil 10
gallons an hour would take slightly over 25 kilowatts of
electricity. Even in our rich country, we don't desalinate
ocean water. We can't recover water because that 25,000
watts to boil water, it's out of the realm of economic
feasibility. But what if you could go through that phase
change since we're making electricity, control in some really
neat way how it goes from one place to another, control the
pressures, control the temperatures, and what if you could
get it so well recovered that for 400 watts of electricity and
waste heat you could make 13 gallons an hour of potable
water? And that amount of waste heat is what comes off
this little engine. So, we decided that would be an
important project. Again, I'm sorry to disappoint you with
two things: It isn't fast, we don't have a roadmap and a
business plan and it's not clear that once we did it, eureka,
we've got a business because the people that need it by
definition are the people that have no money, there isn't a
good obvious distribution channel or people waiting to
throw gobs of money at us for the next version of Nintendo.
So, we'll finish it and then the real genius will come when
we try to figure out how to make it an economic business
model, a real sustainable long-term business model by
which if people have health and don't spend most of their
waking hours worrying about finding water, they can
develop an economy, they can buy things from you, they
can supply things to you, they can make the world a
happier place."

charmed
09-05-2002, 11:34 AM
Thanks for re-posting that, Lawrence. And thanks for the transcribing efforts and coordination in the first place. It's an amazing document, and I wonder how many of the Kamen commentators have even read or heard it.



This should be linked to on the home page.

Antagony
09-06-2002, 07:21 PM
Lawrence, if you are going to list all the potential competition to to Kamen's stirling I suspect that you are going to end up with a very long thread. I get the impression that there are all sorts of new technologies just beyond the horizon. Millions and billions of dollars are being invested in new power and energy sources. Armies of brilliant scientests and engineers are working on them. One has to have a lot of faith in Kamen and his engineers to believe that his stirling will come out on top.

don c.
09-14-2002, 12:16 AM
quote:Originally posted by Seeker

Am I right in thinking that someone ( I believe Don C) at TIQ had mentioned a company which planned on selling small Stirlings for $100 ??


I don't recall that, maybe the coffee-cup stirling from Brent VanArsdell (American Stirling) would fall within that price range..

Seeker
09-14-2002, 09:58 AM
quote:Originally posted by don c.

quote:Originally posted by Seeker

Am I right in thinking that someone ( I believe Don C) at TIQ had mentioned a company which planned on selling small Stirlings for $100 ??


I don't recall that, maybe the coffee-cup stirling from Brent VanArsdell (American Stirling) would fall within that price range..




Hi Don,

Great to see you in the forum !

Sorry about that. I just checked over at TIQ, and it was FreeBSD who had made the quote I was thinking of :

"http://www.omachron.com/papers.html claimed at one time to have a $100 engine and a 2001 ship date. www.whispergen.com ships today."

I'm not sure where the $100 figure comes from. The 750W output model has a production cost of $89, but as far as I can see, that's just the production cost, not the final price tag, and it's based on the assumption that you're producing 100 000 units.

Seeker

don c.
09-14-2002, 11:33 AM
Here is the Yahoo Stirling discussion group Lawrence mentioned earlier: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sesusa/

(Stirling Engine Society USA)

don c.
09-14-2002, 11:50 AM
Here's another potential player in the home Stirling/APU market:
http://www.enatec.com/EN04_ENG.htm

They mention a 2004 introduction date. Right now it looks like their demo unit is only outputting 350W.

Stan
11-07-2003, 07:06 PM
Latest word from/about Omachron/Conrad

-------------------------
A N N O U N C E M E N T S


STIRLING ENGINE UPDATE MARCH 4, 2003
The Fate of Our First Low-cost Mass-Production Stirling-based Engine and the New CGRB Engine
The new CGRB Engine design completely obsoletes the original Conrad Engine and is wholly owned by Omachron.

The Omachron Family of Companies will be announcing their commercial plans for the engine in the third quarter of 2003.
---------------------------

See: <http://www.omachron.com/papers.html> for details.

Murphy's Law seems to afflict Hot 'gas' engines.

beckpm
11-08-2003, 08:29 AM
quote:Originally posted by Stan

Latest word from/about Omachron/Conrad

-------------------------
A N N O U N C E M E N T S


STIRLING ENGINE UPDATE MARCH 4, 2003
The Fate of Our First Low-cost Mass-Production Stirling-based Engine and the New CGRB Engine
The new CGRB Engine design completely obsoletes the original Conrad Engine and is wholly owned by Omachron.

The Omachron Family of Companies will be announcing their commercial plans for the engine in the third quarter of 2003.
---------------------------

See: <http://www.omachron.com/papers.html> for details.

Murphy's Law seems to afflict Hot 'gas' engines.


Stan,
Your link does not work because of the <> symbols surrounding it - try posting it like this:

http://www.omachron.com/papers.html


Peter Beck
Arlington, Virginia

Stan
11-08-2003, 11:51 AM
Peter:
Thanks for tip.
Seems like each of these types of bb's differ in such detail.
When a link doesnt work I next try cut and paste, and finally resort to search engines to find the site.
I had a newsletter regarding the "Fire in The Sky" article in "Discover" to the effect that they had gone from a solar powered Stirling CHP unit to a high temperature photovoltaic system with essentially the same solar reflectors/concentrator. IF you have that newsletter I would be interested in a reference. Thanks, Stan

Mr_Laurenzano
11-08-2003, 04:23 PM
Please read the above string. n/a I thought you bailed nice to see ya back. Keep up the up and up. Old news to some but it beats out every thing I have read here so far. To the future.

peace is a oneway street, with no crossroads and no deadends

GyroGo
11-08-2003, 04:33 PM
quote:Originally posted by Mr Laurenzano

n/a I thought you bailed nice to see ya back.

Mr. L:
Check the year of n/a's post carefully.

. . SegCenter.com (www.SegCenter.com) . .
StirlingInfo (www.StirlingInfo.com) StirlingChat (www.StirlingChat.com)

Mr_Laurenzano
11-08-2003, 05:22 PM
will do thanks.

peace is a oneway street, with no crossroads and no deadends