https://nitter.net/BrianRoemmele/status/1685640452719177728
nanomachines, son. we need trillions of tiny sterling engines :armstrong:
It's stunning how many Americans - full grown adult Americans - think they're the first one to imagine a free energy machine.
dunno why they try so hard, i just plug my power strip into itself
efficiency? who would ever care about something like that?
Idk, you need some amount of torque to get a useful amount of work out of it. Sterling Cycle engines are usually referred to as external combustion engines bc you put fire or another heat source under them. . You can get work out of a 25 degree differential but likely not much. With solar concentrators, sure, but you're going to need a pretty big installation to make one engine.
You got me dead to rights. Being able to push a potato several feet up hill over the course of a few weeks offends me and in the name of 1:1 torque ratios i have found to destroy it.
That's not a potato, that's a high energy density kinetic battery!
Efficiency doesn't matter except for all the energy put into making this shit.
Whats their point? They want sterling engines to reduce reliance on China?
Well clearly,
what matters is it can be built locally by mechanics
Maybe relevant in the post apocalypse if we lose the ability to make PV solar. otherwise completely irrelevant for most applications
NASA and US defense contractors have in the last decade started dumping money into sterling engines as a way to build zero maintenance, failure proof, and idiot proof nuclear fission reactors for spacecraft or lunar base operations.
For example NASA, Los Alamos, and the Y-12 Nation Security Complex built KRUSTY just a few years ago.
Show
Thing is that Sterling Engines aren't some kinda magic revolutionary way to create power, it's one of the oldest engine designs, and just about every other engine design outperforms it in practical applications.
On a side note:
post apocalypse if we lose the ability to make PV solar.We wouldn't have the ability to make new solar PV panels in such a situation. Solar PV are the same as modern computer processors, ie they are a silicon semiconductor devices that require the same advanced foundries used to make computer chips. Without a developed industrial base the size of the US, EU, or China... there will be no solar PV. Hundreds of major companies or state enterprises producing equipment and feedstock that goes into the operation of the few dozen silicon foundries around the globe that have to harness massive economies of scale to make their production viable. This is why I always chuckle at anarchist solar punk stuff that imagines some kinda utopia built around solar PV power without the kind of state apparatus or mature industrial economy that is required to make such devices possible to be built.
yeah, maybe "if" was the wrong word. That's what I meant. Although PV cells are more different than computer chip manufacturing than you imply, they still are a complex process that would not be easy to maintain without a large industrial base.
Fear the electrical deamons promising power without turbines, for their spinless sorcery will fail you in the days to come.
I guess I could see this kinda work if you had a place with regular sunlight and aimed a lot of mirrors at it. The only advantage I can see is an engine that doesn't require any rare earths or complicated manufacturing processes. But what would you do with a low output engine surrounded by an acre of mirrors?
Ha, what a fool. Only stirling engine I care about is
ln(n!) ~ n ln(n) - n
