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Why couldn’t you combine Sterling engines with electric cars and use a heat pump to produce the heat for the engine and air conditioning for the car?
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View Reddit by lingley – View Source
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Why couldn’t you combine Sterling engines with electric cars and use a heat pump to produce the heat for the engine and air conditioning for the car?
[ad_2]
View Reddit by lingley – View Source
Big oil – “Ohhh hell no”
Apart from “big oil” what stopped the widespread adoption?
Weight is a major problem. Stirling engines have a low power-to-weight ratio. Electric cars already tend to be heavier than a comparable car with an internal combustion engines. Adding a Stirling engine on top of that would make the vehicle so heavy, it would negate any increase in efficiency. This is also a problem for hybrid vehicles, since hybrid vehicles also tend to be heavier than normal. Then when you consider the cost, and difficulty starting the engine, you can start to see why Stirling engines aren’t widely adopted.
Stirling engines are heavy, but efficient once started. That relegates Stirling engines to applications where the weight isn’t super relevant. Stirling engines are used in concentrated solar power. A lot of diesel electric submarines use Stirling engines. The Stirling engine runs when the submarine is submerged and running off batteries. That application is very similar to what you discuss, but where the cost and power-to-weight ratio isn’t as important.
So I spent like 8 years working on a Sterling. They have a lot of limitations. In order to get power you need the hot end to be very hot and the cold end needs to be very cold. Then you need the working gas to be at very high pressure and very moveable (we used helium). You can mitigate these issues by scaling it up, but then it is huge and won’t fit in a car well. For low power long life applications they can be used pretty effectively, but the hurdles to make a small (car sized) powerful (IC analog) are very tough to clear.
Would a Sterling engine work well in a hybrid car situation? Electric drive for the car, Sterling generator to charge the batteries. Similar to the original Chevy Volt concept.
Why not strap these or a turbine onto a standard ICE engine. ICE engines produce a ton of waste heat that could be captured by a combined cycle engine.
I didn’t see the nuclear fuel option demonstrated in this video 😆
Isn’t this the same principal that drives the drinking bird?