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Orgone Biophysical Research Lab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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3) Technology Development for Sustainable Energy Generation
Stirling engines are external combustion engines that can use most any
fuel (including biomass, solar, geothermal, fossil or anything that produces
heat), and can drive a generator for onsite electrical power. Stirling
engines are inherently efficient, since they use regenerators that recycle
heat back to the power stroke of its piston. The following article was
recently published on the developmental efforts of an early stage company
seeking to revolutionize the power industry with cost-effective onsite power
generation that could significantly reduce pollution entering our atmosphere.
Who needs nukes when you have innovative technologies dating back 200 years
waiting to be developed for today's energy and environmental standards.
= = = = = = = = =
Athol company on cutting edge with 200-year-old engine concept
May 24, 2001 The Recorder, Greenfield, MA, page 1.
By RICHIE DAVIS
Recorder Staff
ATHOL -- Try to imagine an unlikely setting for a high-tech, energy-efficient
engine. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything that beats the old
vise factory here where Ricardo Conde and company are revving up their
Stirling engine prototype.
In fact, it's hard to imagine how the Stirling engine -- a nearly
200-year-old contraption that once powered tractors and fell into disuse when
the internal combustion engine came into vogue -- can be looked on as
innovative at all.
This is an EXTERNAL combustion engine, which Conde and other principals in
Stirling Advantage Inc. have rescued from the automotive uses that have
attracted most researchers over the years.
Instead, the 6-year-old company has been working on developing a Stirling
engine to generate 200-kilowatts of power for hospitals, hotels, factories
and similar uses. It produces both heat and electricity, can be fueled with
solar power, biomass, natural gas or other fuels and gives off low nitrous
emissions.
``We said, `Let's forget trying to make it fit under the hood of a car and
(instead) make it for what it's best suited,''' said Conde, who hopes to have
20 test model generators ready in about a year or two, if he can raise the
capital. So far, they've spent about $1 million researching and developing
the technology he sees as Stirling gold.
Conde is among the participants in this afternoon's renewable energy Tour de
Sol-related Green Futures workshops at Greenfield Community College. He is
the 40-year-old president and chief executive officer of Stirling Advantage.
With training at New York City Technical College, Brooklyn Polytechnic
Institute and Parsons School of Design, the New Salem resident has had a
lifelong interest in technology development and worked with Athol's
solar-power research octogenarian, Alvin Marks, before turning to optical
films and polarizers and ultimately the engine first invented in 1816 by
Scottish minister Robert Stirling.
Using a heat source external to the engine, his invention pushes a power
piston when hot air expands, not unlike the exploding gases inside a car
engine pushing a piston. The Stirling engine's 16 percent greater potential
efficiency -- allegedly the highest of any heat engine -- comes from using
heat exchangers to cool the hot expanded gas while retaining some of that
heat to power the next cycle. Those pushes of the piston are converted to
mechanical motion by rods and a flywheel, and eventually drive an electric
generator. The heat that is recovered in the cooling cycle then can be
recycled, to heat a building, for example. (In a car's internal combustion
engine much of that heat is simply wasted through hot exhaust and the
radiator.)
Stirling Advantage began focusing on the technology 3 years ago, after
consulting with a team of businesses trying to develop a 2-megawatt generator
for a building on New York's Times Square, Conde said.
The project proved too expensive, ``but we realized there were flaws in the
basic premise of using the technology,'' said Conde. By reworking a Swedish
military design, Conde was able to home in on a plan based on industrial
rather than automotive needs.
While other Stirling developers are busy working on solar-powered 25-kilowatt
generators that require a 35-foot dish to capture the sun's rays, the Athol
team is concentrating on a much larger generator that burns natural gas in
the United States and biomass in Third World countries. Biomass is fuel
derived from corn, wood or other crops, or from methane gases from landfills,
for example.
Using the power directly, along with heat, makes this technique much more
efficient, said Conde. Instead of driving up costs through transmission of
electricity from a central generating plant or storing the electricity
produced, Conde said, ``Our solution is just don't generate the power when
you don't need it.''
Lowering the combustion rate to reduce nitrous oxide emissions, Stirling
Advantage's design produces drastically less pollution than an
internal-combustion engine. The design also introduces a hydraulic motor
rather than depending on a crankshaft.
``So far, it's all theoretical,'' said Conde. ``But these are all
improvements of a state-of-the-art design. Most people are scared to take the
approach we are: to get into a 200-kilowatt should require millions and
millions of dollars for research. We can do it for $1 million. That's what
makes people very skeptical.''
After manufacturing a 20-kilowatt, one-cylinder demonstration engine for
testing over the next couple of months, the company plans to begin turning
out 20 test models of the 200-kilowatt size -- 6-by-6-foot engines that are
about 8-feet high -- to customers that are already lined up, said Conde. One
of those customers is the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
In about two years, if funding works out, the company hopes to turn out
engines at a wholesale price of $90,000, or about $450 per kilowatt. Those
models can get as large as 800 kilowatts before the company has to begin
manufacturing components, Conde said, and can get as large as 5 megawatts
before the technology becomes impractical.
But with potential applications seen at landfills-- where methane gases
could generate power as the engine's heat helps evaporate lechates and
sewage treatment plants, as well as factories, hotels and hospitals, Conde
believes there's a ready market for technology that's been easier to develop
than to capitalize.
With the aim of raising an additional $7 million in investment over the next
two years, he says, ``As always, a lot of big people want to get involved,
but they want to see it first.''
* Richie Davis
The Recorder
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*For additional information on Stirling Advantage
write to Ricardo Conde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<<<
--
...Warren Rekow
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
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