I wonder if anyone has thought of producing a simple steam conversion for Wankel rotor engines. All the advantages of a turbine with none of the high RPM headaches. Or maybe a simple low rpm low efficiency steam piston engine with integral generator windings like the picoturbine. It would seem to me that one could injection mold one from high temp plastic and use a Teflon cyl. liner thereby reducing the component cost substantially. I also understand that plans for a low tech steam engine built of PVC pipe once existed. Does anyone have a lead on this?
Fluid bed reactors are basically a vertical tube with a blower at the bottom. A bed of "sand" sits in the tube atop a perforated plate which allows air to pass through the sand but prevents the sand from falling past. Between the blower and the plate is a preheater, typically a gas jet, which is used to heat the sand to the desired combustion temp. A fuel feed is built in to the tube slightly above the perf. plate which is an injector for liquids or an auger for solids.A hydraulic ram might also be used to feed some solids. To convert to a boiler a second tube is attached to the outside of the first and water is run through the space between. A probe tube can also be added down the "throat" of the unit made up of a pipe within a pipe to increase BTU extraction. Our bench test units used "shop vacs" as the blowers and we used the water to measure BTUs produced by various fuels. This was the basic setup...and was very simple to build...but of course there were other considerations that needed attending to for long term operation. In practice one would turn on the blower and light the preheater (spark ignition). The blower suspends the sand and creates a vigorous mixing in the medium while the preheater warmed it up. Once the sand (fluid bed) had reached the desired temperature sufficient to initiate combustion of the specific fuel the injector or auger was turned on and the preheater turned off at which point the reaction became self sustaining. The abrasive property of the sand reduced any carbon particles to molecular size very rapidly. This created a very efficient combustion of the fuel. It also allowed us to add reactants to the fluid bed to control potential pollutants. The variety of materials we could combust was amazing and the ability to control combustion byproducts in this simple manner was a huge plus. At one point a large unit (several story) was constructed to power a gas turbine and produce electricity from sewage sludge and municipal solid waste. I have no doubt that even our bench test units could power a 10 hp steam engine using the waste glycerin component of biodiesel production. And the heat from not only the spent steam but also the reactor exhaust could be used in the production process with very little attendant pollution. Currently the cost of a steam powered generator is much more than the cost of a diesel generator which could be run on SVO and whose waste heat could be used similarly. I would much prefer however to use waste glycerin in an "external combustion engine" as the efficiency would eventually pay off and the cost of pollution of any internal combustion engine while hard to quantify against the large volume of the atmosphere exists. Yet another debt we will leave to our progeny. I hope this helps. Feel free to contact me if you would like more information. Dana Linscott __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
