Hi I am in the beginning of my finale project for my bachelor’s degree.
The project is about using a solar reflector to heat up an insulated tank via air witch later in the day can be used to cook food.
This project is for developing countries so there is no power available. We of course need power for the tracing system (the tracing engines) and a fan to circulate the air from the solar reflector to the heat storing tank.
This will be about 20-30 W of power in total.
The easiest way to get this power is of course just to buy a couple of solar panels to power it, but we thought that it wood be cheaper and more interesting to use a stirling engine to power it. And the stirling engine can also produce power even when the sun is gone (from the heat in the heat storing tank).
So I made this drawing in inventor for the engine:
And the files:
(the uploading of the inventorfiles zip faild)
The displacercylinder is 2 times as big as the powercylinder. And i was thinking of adding a regenerator.
The white seksjon in the middle of the displacercylinder is some cheramic to stop heat from being transfered from the hot side too the cold side (figured this out myself (i have not seen anyone else using this)).
My inpiration for the 4 cylinder stirling was from this one:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ZcdnsUgCc"]YouTube - Ideal cycle gamma stirling engine[/ame]
But because i dont know how to make the sinus swasplate in inventor or in real life i made a crankshaft instead.
The problem is how big it hawe to bee too make over 30 W of power? (anything more is just a bonus (it can power some lights or something like that))
And how shod the seals for the “power piston” and for the axle between the two cylinders be? Would an O-ring work?