Steam Engines?

brenneis

I was actually looking at some of the commercial steam piston engines for sale on the market check out this site... http://home.earthlink.net/~dlaw70/12stmng.htm
spoke to Mike...super nice guy and really know his stuff........ he gives you plans with the engine to build a boiler which can run on wood, leaves, coal whatever you got in Alaska to burn... not sure about environment but if you are buring wood anyway then you should look at this...

benefits are that you get more bang for your buck...you use the steam to turn a 1500 watt generator and the big beni to steam is that you get huge heat by product

from his site

Our 2-cylinder 3 horsepower steam engine will provide 1500 watts of electrical power and over 100,000 BTUs of exhaust heat

the heat by product could be used to heat your house or I assume it could be fitted somehow to pump the heat into a clothes dryer......heck just hanging the clothes on a line in a small room with that kind of heat by product would dry them real quick....

Gooserider

Re: Clothes dryer: propane vs. electric

Interesting idea, though it is worth noting that many states may have a lot of nasty rules and regs to get past if you want to put a steam boiler in your basement...

I'm a mod over on Hearth.com (IIRC the site that referred me here) and we had a thread a while back in the "boiler room" which is where people running various forms of wood boiler / hydronic central heating systems hang out, discussing the idea of trying to do a "hydronic" powered clothes dryer by replacing the heater in the dryer with a water-air heat exchanger of some sort.

Far as I know it never got beyond the speculation stage, the conclusion most people reached was that it would be expensive to do, and there was considerable concern about the ability of a hydronic system to deliver enough BTU's to the clothes to dry a load in about the same time as a stock unit - considered a requirement in order to get adequate "WAF" (aka "Wife Acceptance Factor) and not to burn up any energy saved by not running the burner in spinning the drum...

Gooserider

icarus

Re: Clothes dryer: propane vs. electric

I have a hunch there is a reason that external combustion engines have gone out of favour. I know nothing about the technology,, but even with the most modern triple expansion steam engines were not very thermally efficient.

Tony

Gooserider

Re: Clothes dryer: propane vs. electric

icarus wrote: »

I have a hunch there is a reason that external combustion engines have gone out of favour. I know nothing about the technology,, but even with the most modern triple expansion steam engines were not very thermally efficient.

Tony

Agreed, but there are potentially ways to limit that... I've heard of proposals to take the exhaust steam from an engine and run it through a thermal storage tank in order to condense the steam back to water (to send back to the boiler) and store the heat energy for further distribution.

Essentially the idea is to do "co-generation" like some of the dino-powered combined heat and power systems where they have an engine powered generator producing electric and using the cooling system to heat the house - supposedly at a higher total efficiency than simply running a straight boiler flame.

I would think that if you could keep the heat loss from the steam engine to a reasonable level and it was in a space that you needed to heat anyway, then one could do a relatively efficient system. Seems to me like the biggest reason steam engines got a bad rap for inefficiency is that little or no effort gets made to use the "bottom cycle" heat for anything. (Much the same can be said for cars - most of the energy from the burning gas gets thrown away as heat, with little effort to use it for anything...)

Gooserider

BB.

Re: Clothes dryer: propane vs. electric

Brennis,

If you have wood available--look into wood gasification via Google. Seems to be one of the cleanest, most efficient ways to burn wood--plus you could use the Wood Gas to provide "fuel" to an internal combustion engine (was fairly common in many countries around WWII and earlier).

However--I would stay away from steam engines unless you do it as a hobby (steam powered RC or small boats, etc.).

-Bill

BB.

Re: Steam Engines?

By the way, I have moved this to its own thread instead of Electric/propane powered clothes driers.

-Bill

mike95490

Re: Steam Engines?

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#Efficiency
In practice, a steam engine exhausting the steam to atmosphere will typically have an efficiency (including the boiler) in the range of 1% to 10%, but with the addition of a condenser and multiple expansion, it may be greatly improved to 25% or better.

A power station with steam reheat, economizer etc. will achieve about 20-40% thermal efficiency. It is also possible to capture the waste heat using cogeneration in which the waste heat is used for heating a lower boiling point working fluid or as a heat source for district heating via saturated low pressure steam. By this means it is possible to use as much as 85-90% of the input energy.

Compared to automotive engines:
most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18%-20%

But, again, the boiler is where the city/state/insurance company will shut you down.

Gooserider

Re: Steam Engines?

BB. wrote: »

By the way, I have moved this to its own thread instead of Electric/propane powered clothes driers.

-Bill

Makes sense, as it was getting away from the original topic, but is of interest in it's own right... (though it was a bit confusing since I got an e-mail notice pointing to new messages in the dryer thread - no biggie, as I guessed that had happenned)

As to your suggestion of looking into wood gasification on Wikipedia, that is a good idea for general info. W/O intent of violating any rules about pointing to other sites, (far as I know NAWS doesn't do boilers ) I'd suggest people looking for "nuts & bolts" application of gasification could do a lot worse than to look at Hearth.com, particularly their "boiler room"

I would say that wood gasification is in essence the idea behind any of the modern EPA approved wood stoves, or at least the idea of burning off the released wood gasses with secondary combustion.

The wood gasification boilers take this to an extreme, and some of the European "Lambda control" boilers (Frolling in particular) are claiming over 90% efficiency in burning wood and turning it into usable heat, w/ emissions that are comparable to a good dino-burner (but carbon neutral)

IMHO, to drag things back to the solar table, I think that a wood gasification boiler would combine nicely with a solar hot water heating system.

It hasn't progressed beyond the mental fantasy stage yet, but I'm seriously looking into doing something along that line in our house - Solar hot water collection on the roof w/ glazed panels, feeding into a 1-1.5kgal thermal storage tank (needed for optimal operation of the boiler) with a gasification boiler to supplement it during the heating season. - Use the heated water to drive a radiant in-floor house heat, DHW, and since I would have excess production in the summer, heat the swimming pool...

One of the Hearth.com members is doing something similar, (but only uses his solar in the summer time) and went from 800 gallons / yr of oil to 12 (he went on vacation) and 5 cords of wood, to heat 3600sqft, a hot tub, in Northern VT....

Gooserider

BB.

Re: Steam Engines?

Please feel free to make links to any interesting/energy related website...

My (apparently poorly worded earlier) warning in another thread was towards spammers and people whose first (and only posting) was pointing to their own link farms (for ad revenue).

Other than spam, porn, and scam links (and fixing format once in a while)--I don't think I have edited/deleted any posts here at all.

All we ask is that if a product you are talking about is available at Northern Arizona's Wind & Sun web store--that you try and use that link--since they are funding/maintaining this web forum.

-Bill

Gooserider

Re: Steam Engines?

Please feel free to make links to any interesting/energy related website...

My (apparently poorly worded earlier) warning in another thread was towards spammers and people whose first (and only posting) was pointing to their own link farms (for ad revenue).

Other than spam, porn, and scam links (and fixing format once in a while)--I don't think I have edited/deleted any posts here at all.

All we ask is that if a product you are talking about is available at Northern Arizona's Wind & Sun web store--that you try and use that link--since they are funding/maintaining this web forum.

-Bill

Sounds fair enough Bill - I have just found some sites are fussier about it than others, so I try to be sensitive to the issue - though I do like it when people can provide links to manufacturer or other relevant sites, if it doesn't conflict with the interest of the site I'm posting on...

To get back to the wood gas issue, yes, it is possible to run engines and so forth off "Producer gas" from wood gasification, there were a lot of German and Scandinavian efforts at this around the time of WWII... However there are a few things to be aware of when trying to do so, especially in a home environment.

1. DANGER ALERT! the wood gasses from gasification contain a very high level of carbon monoxide! When wood gasifies, the two major gasses produced are methane and CO. I forget the exact percentage, but in addition to being flammable, the CO percentage in wood gas is high enough to make it quite deadly - make sure that any effort to harvest the gas and use it outside the gasifier is plumbed in such a way that the gas can't end up in a habitable space. Make sure your design includes failsafes as needed.

2. Producer gas is DIRTY - it has a lot of tars and other liquids suspended in it, along with carbon particles, etc. While much of this is potentially combustible, if the gas cools it will condense out, and tend to clog plumbing, etc. Also a lot of the particles will make internal combustion engines unhappy over time, so they need to be quite carefully filtered out. Over on hearth.com they had a link to some Swedish guys that built a gasifier powered car and drove it around the country. Interesting link, but it is worth noting that their filtering setup was as big or bigger than the actual wood gasification unit.

Bottom line is that while it is entirely possible to harvest the wood gasses and use them for other things, it has a lot of associated hassles, and thus it is probably most efficient to burn the gasses as they are produced in a unit such as a gasification boiler or an EPA approved wood stove.

Gooserider

brenneis

Re: Steam Engines?

You guys are way to smart for me.....I was just thinking, burn wood, boil water, make steam, turn generator aaarrrrgghhh....

anyway, I think this is probably up there with the idea of perpetual motion but Dan from Green Science on utube makes a small steam engine turn using a fresnell lens on a boiler. Obviously you would need some way to dissipate the heat better than simply pointing a 2000 degree beam at a piece of metal, but is this concept plausible for the home power guy.....Imagine using the sun to boil water and turn a steam turbine in your backyard....how cool....

Solar Guppy

Re: Steam Engines?

Useless ... the lens has to be in a tracker to have any effect. There is also the small matter of how much energy is in the sun light, its @ 1000 watts-meter-squared ... 1000 watts ( 100% efficiency ) is about 3000btu .. not going to boil much of anything unless your collecting a roof full of light and concentrating on a very small pipe

BB.

Re: Steam Engines?

There is really nothing out there that cheaply converts heat to mechanical motion very well for the home user (wood fired boilers, solar thermal, etc.)...

I have always lusted over this Solar Powered Stirling Engine Model--but never bought one (not cheap--Stirling engines just don't look like they would work to me so I find them fascinating).

-Bill

Gooserider

Re: Steam Engines?

BB. wrote: »

There is really nothing out there that cheaply converts heat to mechanical motion very well for the home user (wood fired boilers, solar thermal, etc.)...

I have always lusted over this Solar Powered Stirling Engine Model--but never bought one (not cheap--Stirling engines just don't look like they would work to me so I find them fascinating).

-Bill

It isn't solar powered, but there are a couple of different thermally powered fans that you can get to set on top of a wood stove, intended to help circulate the stove heat output. One model is powered by a sterling engine, IIRC the other uses a Peltier junction device to drive an electric motor.

Of the two, the sterling engine unit is supposed to work better at moving air, and is less sensitive to overheating. Only reported problem is that if you leave the optional dust cover off so you can watch the mechanical innards, they get dirty and gum up after a while. OTOH the Peltier powered units are supposedly not as strong, have a narrower range of operation, and get fried if the stove overheats.

Haven't checked prices recently, but I think the sterling stove fan is less than the model you pointed at - no link handy, sorry.

Gooserider

FL SUN

Re: Steam Engines?

Getting back to steam engines, steam is not an automatic thing. It takes a lot of energy to create a change of state. With solar, it takes a lot of area to create enough heat to make the volume of flow you need for real work, then you have to condense that steam and recapture it without a great loss. It requires supervision, and is downright dangerous (deadly) due to burns and explosion. The concentrated aspect of solar steam generation is also very dangerous. The focal will set anything flammable on fire in an instant. They'd never allow it in a residential setting for all reasons under the sun. No pun intended.

That dish in my avator is a working unit of a small scale CSP steam generator prototype we did. It is 6' diameter, (28 sq ft). The focal on the collector is very hot and will drop that aluminum collector like solder if it is not kept cool with water (or steam). The dish now serves as a thermal heater for hot water. It has to track the sun in both axes to work. It is no where near as efficient as the good old fashioned flat plate collector. The dish is something that attracts a lot of attention to the solar mindset, which is what I'm a major advocate for.:D

When you look at comparison of pv power to what you get in a roundabout way with steam for your home, pv's are the way to go. Nice, quiet, and safe.

Glenne

Re: Steam Engines?

Some of you may be interested in a waste heat engine that is being developed by a company in Florida. It is said to be some new kind of steam engine. Apparently it was one of the inventions of the year by Popular Science Magazine in 2008. The link to their site is www.cyclonepower.com. I would like to see one of the things run.

Gooserider

Re: Steam Engines?

Looks interesting, but it has some aspects that make my "BS detectors" feel awfully touchy... I realize they probably aren't in large scale production, but it would be nice if there was more to show that these were really functioning engines and not just (literally in this case) "Vaporware"

Among other things that seemed a bit strange was the prototype engines shown were WAY fancy and nice looking - they didn't look like a development product, they looked like a ready to ship item... It was also hard to tell with all the different applications and engine designs they mentioned, which were engines that actually existed, and which were just theory on paper...

May be the next big thing, but I don't think I'm going to purchase any stock yet...

Gooserider