Producing Electricity

[Peakebrook]

I recently saw a show on the Chena power plant that is producing electricity using the heat from a hot spring in Alaska.  The turbine was built by United Tech using mostly equipment from their Carrier AC division.  (google: "Chena power plant" and "organic rankine cycle")

Instead of using water steam to power the turbine, refrigerator type coolant was used.  The coolant boils at 40 F.  The water from the hot spring measures 175-180 degrees F, therefore it "boils" the coolant and powers the turbine.

I wonder if the rumored Wood-mizer heat and electricity boiler is based on this technology?  Seems like a great way to produce both hot water and electricity from a wood/biomass boiler. 

[Dave Shepard]

I was recently told about a mercury boiler. It used a non-condensing turbine in the first stage, and a condensing turbine in the second. The mercury vapor was sprayed with water between stages to cool it. I guess the mercury ate it's way through most any gasket material, and isn't a very nice element in it's vapor form.

[pineywoods]

I don't think the biomizer would use anything like this. If you read the details, you will find that systems like this require a huge source of cooling water to condense the freon back to a liquid state after it goes through the turbine. I have been following the biomizer project since day one. Don't have any inside info, but some educated guesses. The most practical way would be to use a sterling engine, needs no fuel, just a source of heat, to drive a dc generator.  The generator would charge a battery, which would power a dc-ac inverter to provide 110 volt 60 cycle power. There's a bunch of nitty gritty details like getting the heat from the combustion chamber to the sterling engine. Then there's the efficency issue, sterling engines are not very efficient. I'm of the opinion that the best way to electricity from wood is a wood gassifier running an off-the shelf genset.

[bandmiller2]

Its fairly easy and old tech.to produce your own electric the trick is to get it on auto pilot,to work safely wile your asleep or at work.Best is to have a system when you need alot of power and your there to tend it ,off hours use the utility bought power.Frank C.

[slowzuki]

I would take a guess yes.  The sterling engines work in a similar way, they have to reject the heat as well during their cooling cycle.

I wonder if the rumored Wood-mizer heat and electricity boiler is based on this technology?  Seems like a great way to produce both hot water and electricity from a wood/biomass boiler. 

[JimMartin9999]

Problem with the sterling engine is that nobody seems to sell them.  What I do like about the idea is that they seem to be a lot safer than steam engines and  you don`t have to watch them so closely. And you can just leave them at the end of the day; as they coll off, they slow down and stop.
    Seems like the optimum way of converting cordwood into electricity.

[Ianab]

Problem with the sterling engine is that nobody seems to sell them.

That does seem to be the main problem.

I can see how one could work with a wood furnace, just having the cylinder heads in the flue would provide the heat. The outside air is cold, well when the furnace is running anyway. The bigger difference you can get between the hot and cold side, the better, but effeciency isn't a big concern. You are collecting waste energy that would go up the flue anyway. If you only get 10%, well thats 10% less being wasted, and anyone living off-grid would generally be happy to get 500 or so watts of continous power. Thats an engine driving a good car alternator.

If your heating and hot water are taken care of by the wood burner then 500w gives you lights, TV and computer etc

Running a high pressure steam boiler is pretty technical, and getting it wrong can result in a big bang. The old steam powered sawmills had a guy that got to work at 4am to get the engine fired up for the day, and basically nursed it all day. A sterling engine.. well if you got it too hot it might melt, but so would the wood burner itself. If it gets too cold, it stops.

As for the practical aspects - I believe GM actually built a sterling engine prototype car inthe 70s(?). The advantage I can see is you could run it on anything flamable. Petrol, Kero, diesel, vege oil, alcohol, Propane, natural gas - just by changing or adjusting the burner.

So its not impossible.

Ian

[pineywoods]

I'm not an expert on sterling engines, read a bit, talked to some folks who had one running in a dodge pickup. NASA did a small backburner project a few years back. The data on that project was available to the public. The cylinder head was made of some exotic hi-temp alloy. Burning up the head was a chronic problem. Long term goal was to build one with a chunk of plutonium buried in the head to provide power for deep space probes. I think the project was abandoned in favor of a thermocouple approach. Somewhere I came across a demo article showing how to make a running sterling engine from tomato cans and coat hanger wire. It would run on the heat from a large candle. I have had my hands on a small model that was mounted in the center of a parobolic dish. It ran quite well on sunlight.

[JimMartin9999]

There are tons of models  of the Sterling engine out therre.  Hardly any useful engines though.  Google and youtube show some engines.  For off-grid they would be fantastic   if you have a source of fuelwood.  I would think some of our mechanically gifted friends could come up with a workable engine made from scrap parts.  As long as it is cheap, the efficiency would not be a problem.

[Fla._Deadheader]

 Google up Rider-Erickson hot air engines. They were water pumpers.  Takes a LOT of engine to make electricity.

  Might consider a Tesla Turbine, for generation

  Don't read this, it won't work. 

 http://www.overunity.com/index.php?topic=7125.0

[OneWithWood]

I seem to recall that Woodmizer did a lot of research into Sterling engines a while back.
It would not be farfetched to imagine one coupled to a biomizer.

[Dan_Shade]

I've done some research on tesla turbines.  I'm convinced that they don't work as claimed.  If they did, they'd be everywhere.

I'd love to see an operational one, and a dyno graph with fuel consumptions.

[Fla._Deadheader]

  http://www.frank.germano.com/theturbine.htm

[Tom]

According to a news article on the TV yesterday, the new Electrical producing technology is fusion, the sun's method of converting hydrogen to heat.   There is a  building, the size of 3 football fields, being built for the testing now and the news was that they thought they would have it working in 2011.   It is no larger than a pencil erasor and can provide the power for an entire city from water, H₂O.

Looks like this would have gotten more press if it were really viable.


Fox New Article

"Within the next two weeks, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore, Calif., will fire 192 separate laser beams capable of generating 500 trillion watts — 1,000 times the power of the U.S. national grid — for a fraction of a second"

"We hope the ignition experiments will show that we can generate more power than we put in and that fusion can be the source of a supply of carbon-free energy," said Ed Moses, director of the NIF.

[logwalker]

This company has been making a small splash in the marine generator business for a few years. I don't know how successful they have been. Joe

http://www.whispergen.com/main/HOME/

[pineywoods]

It is no larger than a pencil erasor and can provide the power for an entire city from water, H₂O.

Looks like this would have gotten more press if it were really viable.


Fox New Article

"Within the next two weeks, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore, Calif., will fire 192 separate laser beams capable of generating 500 trillion watts — 1,000 times the power of the U.S. national grid — for a fraction of a second"

"We hope the ignition experiments will show that we can generate more power than we put in and that fusion can be the source of a supply of carbon-free energy," said Ed Moses, director of the NIF.

 Newsroom hype. Must have been a slow day .fuel is hydrogen, not water. Put hydrogen or one of it's isotopes under enough heat and pressure and 2 hydrogen atoms fuse together to form 1 atom of helium, plus a small amount of radiation and an enormous amount of heat-like millions of degrees. So far, the only successful method has been to use a fission device as a trigger, in other words, a thermo-nuclear device.  This project is attempting to accomplish fusion  by heating a small hunk of frozen hydrogen with a bunch of high powered lazers.  Even if successful, all it will produce is a bunch of heat for a very short period of time.  That's a long long way from making useable amounts of electrical power.

[Thehardway]

I am currently involved in an alternative energy program for a University.  We have been approached by a company which is about ready to begin producing a LN2 powered generator.

Nitrogen has some very interesting characteristics in it's expansion and compression cycles, is abundant, safe and "earth friendly".  I am supposed to be going to see a prototype in action in the near future.  If this is what they say it is it will be huge as it is a self-sustaining operation with a small amount of external thermal input (such as a small thermal solar collector) to begin the expansion process.  Very simple, very efficeient, very clean with less moving parts than a comparable sized Diesel gen-set.

Whispergen as Piney mentioned has introduced a similar concept.

I don't see much future for Hydrogen based generation as it is too volatile and difficult to transport, dispense, and control its energy release.  These factors make it very inefficient as an energy source.

The future of electrical power lies in on-site generation without the need to transport fuel.  This is what makes Nitrogen attractive.