Simple solar Stirling engine with solar reflector

[jonnyasprin]

Is that a solar powered airplane?

[Lenangreal]

hahaha cool!

[DevynGrayer]

armsterfinancial. com

[Jordankewl]

I junked so many hard drives last year, i wish i had saved all the platters now! This is a great idea :D

[VonZegen]

Wonderfully executed! My only suggestion would be painting the area where the reflectors hit black so that more radiation is absorbed. Cheers!

[kennethvanhorn]

take your idea and enhance it. i will tell you take your home made parabolic dish and make a focal point that will reflect the suns bright light down into mirrored tubing the mirrored tubing will then send the light into a mirrored box(mirrors must reflect inward)then inside box put in solar panels(must spin to keep cool)then use the exhaust heat to heat up your home. kenneth van horn's invention...!

[Uniflow]

@kennethvanhorn

Half the fun here was to use the hard drive discs. Also the engine has a 5" dia heating surface which requires heating evenly all over, so the discs do a good job.

[astrialkil]

A more powerful one of these engines would be great for your wood stove to blow hot air around the room!

[specallez]

Superb! 

[piespokladowy]

Super!

[windandsun68]

nice

[Uniflow]

If you spend half your working day filling you office bin with old discs they are a good option!

[rooflee]

Toy plane propeller: $2.00. 21 hard drives: $ 500.00. Watching the propeller rotate at 100 RPM: PRICELESS. Lol, jokes, jokes. But seriously, why not just use mirrors? Gotta be more commercially viable than hard drive disks.

[schr4nz]

@rooflee do you have any idea how many old hard discs get thrown out on a daily basis? do you keep your old 4GB and 8GB drives? I don't...

[Uniflow]

There are acres in the southern USA covered in huge solar powered stirling engines, all tracking the sun. I don't know how much power they get out of them, but they must be commercially viable.

[dan020350]

how big must the Stirling be to power a home ?

[schr4nz]

@dan020350 it's not so much about how big the engin is, but how much overall power output it produces. I think the main factors are how much heat is generated to drive the piston, as well as overall engin design, e.g: a tiny cylinder with lots of heat being produced. if theres way too much heat it dissipates or damages the components, if theres a bit too much, it wastes energy, the happy medium must be found. An engine the size of an LCD monitor could probably power a home if well designed.

[PonyHaven]

I love it.

A Stirling engine with gigabytes of backup, in case of a crash ;) .

It's a work of art!

[bman462]

@icovada no, he just has a neck and can look up

[NanetteW]

lol  0:24 ~_^

[boorelius]

Hahaha, it looks so measly :P

[6bettyboo9]

right on!

[hel257]

by using this satanic rotor, u have changed the internal trajectory of earth, butterfly effect :/

[AKAOJ]

a parabolic disk would work far better.

[Uniflow]

A parabolic dish is not required. It would give a pin-piont of heat, whereas each of the hard drive discs reflect over the whole of the area giving an even distribution of heat and the total input works very well.

[gammypage]

@Uniflow yeah but you clearly have them all angled to focus the light

[efahrenholz1]

@Uniflow Your method works, but it isn't optically efficient. You don't have to use a perfectly smooth parabolic surface but it would definitely benefit from not having a 50% loss of light from holes!

[Shahidnabibullah]

Now that's what you call British optimism!

[soggieshorts1]

i am with ya cdimmm

[arpnlaei]

Nice work. I like the small propellor in place of the flywheel, neat idea.

[cdimmm]

To many Chemtrails here in the states for solar to be a viable energy source. Nice job.

[icovada]

Oh sure, chemtrails block the Sun.

Where did you read that? on 4chan?

[cdimmm]

Just look up

[Jackson41031]

There is so many stirling engine and collector designs on the tube, But this is one of the most inspiring designs I have seen. excellent!

Thank you for sharing your technology....

[BOOJANMK]

yay..its great....

[Procrastinatathor]

HELL YEAH I got all of these and was looking for my own solar collector, just when I found this!

[Stellstelladelnord]

Lovely, interesting! I just destroyed several used discs after trying to utilize them in several ways - except in this way! It never entered my mind!

[thepvcbikeguy]

You could build one Stirling engine and show people how you did it. O nicely done.

[ResearchX]

The Temperature reaches up to 117 degrees where I live. I bet this would work really well here.

[spikespeigel]

they rely on a temperature difference to run not necessarily just heat. you can put it where it will get both sun and shade then it will work

[MustafaAlKanadi]

yea, water boils at 100

[ResearchX]

Yeah I live in Oklahoma and it really gets that hot here. Water from a water hose can scald you if you turn on the faucet and don't let it run a bit before touching the water. People drop from heat exhaustion and even tomatoes cook on the vine. We make tea by filling a jar with water and putting in a few tea bags. Leave a few hours and the water gets so hot that it makes tea. We call it sun tea. I believe this part of America would be great for solar energy farms.

[silas232003]

exactly. I really don't know why the process is slow... well actually I do. they havent been able to mass produce such things. Mass productions and specializing always make things cheap. Solar panels and stuff need to be created with mass production and machinery in mind. T boone Pickens is doing great in his windmill but I solar power as a greater tool. Its getting hotter each year. I swear if billionaire come together for such a cause... i would pay them.

[1alopezpr]

This could apply to a wind generator/turbine for an alternative to propel or mantain the motion of the wind generator in case of lack of wind flow.Not an expert,just wonder.

[cosminx2003]

did you make the piston from wood pulp/celulose?

[Uniflow]

The power piston is a section of latex glove loosly stretched over the perspex tubing.

[ahriman2000]

for the solar reflection there are other solutions, here is one I'd like you to consider and compare to hard disks: take a lot of discarded mirrors and cut them into smaller pieces round or straight sided then stick them to a sheet of cloth or rubber and suspend the sheet into a concave.

On another related note, can you please find a more convenient source or solution to obtain a Fresnel lens? I only know about the wide screen television source.

[Uniflow]

Look on ebay for 'Mosaic Mirror Tiles', they would work nicely glued onto an old satelite dish.

[ahriman2000]

Great! now I can really do something useful with all those busted hard drives.

[abdulbaqi88]

Just by using cds or dvds?

[Uniflow]

Take an old computer hard drive, strip it down, and it's full of discs that make good mirrors.

[dirtydogvideo]

9.99 for innovation...10 for scrounging the hard drives for mirrors(must be a computer head)...and 10.99...for using free sunlight!.lol!...so here's a question for ya!..how many RETARDS does it take to not consider using the suns power for energy, before the rest of us RETARDS figure it out for ourselves?lol!...how many years has it been shining?..lol!...nice job! walt

[rutgermsc]

Splendid :)

[chinnerz2]

thats soo cool!

[furzeham]

Excellent

[electrique527]

Cute! :)