Short Summary

Consider an automobile engine without the expensive and annoying need for frequent trips to the  dealership or garage.  Think of an engine that has only five moving parts, no internal seals, weighs less, delivers superior fuel efficiency and lasts longer than the internal combustion engine.  Think of a replacement that also runs better in cold weather and doesn’t lose power at high altitude.

This is possible with the High-Pressure Double-Acting Rotary Stirling Engine.  And not just for cars.

Other applications include emergency preparedness, boating, camping; practically anything that requires a quiet, clean, reliable and efficient source of power.  This Rotary Stirling Engine also works in applications where heat needs to be moved from one place to another,  such as in refrigeration. Stirling engines, when rotated will pump heat quite efficiently.

The Internal Combustion Engine has been around for over two centuries.  During this time, its inherent flaw has required a legion of workarounds and modifications to address the problem.  Still, that initial, inherent flaw remains...  that the combustion is internal.  This is a problem that the Rotary Stirling engine avoids completely.  So the possibilities are amazing.

The internal combustion engine presently runs just about everything that moves, from cars to pumps, to airplanes, boats and backup generators. The Stirling Engine is used in spacecraft and in submarines. This variation of the Stirling engine, the Rotary Stirling Engine,  can produce power comparable to  the internal combustion engine.  It produces this energy more efficiently and, without all the extra parts, is simple to build.

I was brought up in a home where both my parents were private pilots. My mother taught elementary school and was a talented musician.  My father was constantly tinkering and inventing things.  He had little business education and was unaware that he could or should patent his inventions.  Everyone in my home town either worked for NASA, or one of the aircraft manufacturers or in a support business.  My father worked for NASA and one of his jobs was to do the actual wiring so that an ambulance could transmit EKG data from the field to a hospital. It was leading edge at the time.

With my father’s encouragement and guidance, I was always able to look at something and understand how it works and then imagine how it could work better.  I did well in Chemistry and physics.  I really liked the shop classes, and I was frequently the only one to solve the riddles posed by our drafting teacher.  After college, family, working, running a business, selling the business, I found myself with some spare time. After having to re-design the Stirling engine to work in another project, I began to see the possibilities of this design.

For further details about the High-Pressure Double-Acting Rotary Stirling Engine, go to http://stirling.nevadacan.com  

What We Need & What You Get

In addition to the initial designs and legal costs that I have already covered, there are five main categories of expense for this project:

• Engineering                                          $25,000
  
• Legal                                                       $25,000
  
• Manufacturing                                     $17,000
  
• Travel                                                      $18,000
  
• Project coordination                          $20,000
  

Manufacturing costs will depend on the final design.  I started out trying for a shade tree design that used existing parts, but a shade tree design can’t be efficiently manufactured and won’t maximize the advantages of this engine.  The whole point of this exercise is to build something that works better, costs less and pollutes less. Using a poor final design could delay the adoption of this engine for years. I have determined what kind of machining a test engine would take and a great design is less costly to produce than a poor design.

Engineering fees  are estimated at about $25,000.  The design is mine, but I don’t have the specialized expertise that is needed. For example: the expansion coefficients of various materials and which metal should be used where, what size bearings to use, how much material it takes to give a piston rod enough strength so that it only flexes within tolerance, or how thick the walls need to be to hold the pressure.  The working design has to be easy to assemble, use materials that are readily recycled at the end of their useful life, be manufacturable without special tooling and be repairable with a minimum of trouble by people twenty years from now if it gets damaged.  Engineers already know how to do these things better than I could even if I had time off work to go to school and learn each engineering specialty.

Legal fees, according to my attorney at Holland and Hart LLC, will run a minimum of about $25,000 by the time I get an engine combined with an alternator packaged and ready for market.  

The Impact

The Stirling engine as it exists today, runs in spacecraft, submarines, solar energy plants, commercial refrigeration plants and on the hobbyist's workbench. If they were cheap and powerful in addition to being reliable, non polluting and quiet - we could all be using them.  On many occasions, I have wished that something were available so I could buy it. A back up generator that doesn’t get fouled from sitting idle too long and that could run on whatever fuel was available for example. With volume production this rotary Stirling engine could produce the same power more efficiently and for about one-half of the cost of  the average internal combustion engine it would replace.

Risks & Challenges

When I look at existing Stirling engines and see them working with the limited heat transfer area and limited fill pressures and their slide seals I see a principle that works . Since I am not changing the basic physics of the Stirling, just rearranging the parts and getting rid of the internal seals, I am confident that it will work better than existing Stirling engines.This design has some engineering challenges. By hiring a competent engineering company, these challenges can be optimally addressed.  

Other Ways You Can Help

A lot of people each doing a little can accomplish great things. I am spread too thin.  Between working, taking care of a friend’s two year old while she recovers her health, keeping my family together and running this project I am overwhelmed. This project needs to be done.  I learned to build a website, but I don’t have time to maintain it.  I learned CAD but I don’t have time to learn to do it well.  I had to learn about patents and contracts  There are so many skills that I don’t have that are needed in this project.  All of these problems can be solved with a little money.

If you know about crowdsourcing, maybe we can design this project online. Are you an artist who can help communicate this project?  We need logos and illustrations.  We need a good name for both the project and the engine.

If you know someone that hates pollution and the internal combustion engine, tell them about this project.  If you know people who are worried about global warming and are open to a green replacement for their air conditioners and refrigerators, tell them about this project.  If you know someone who likes cool stuff, tell them about this project.  The more people that are aware of this project, the more likely it is to succeed.  The technical problems are simple, any other challenges can be met with your help