15d • Your Daily Dose
Fluidyne Engines
Here's a wonderful little blend of physics and simple engineering to build what may be the simplest heat engine possible. It's called a Fluidyne engine. The concept was handled pretty thoroughly in the April 1985 edition of The Amateur Scientist. You can follow the link here to read the original article.
The Fluidyne engine is a simple type of Sterling engine. It's easy to build and could be one of the simplest home-brew ways of converting solar energy to electricity.
I found a few videos describing how to build one on a bench top. For some reason most of the videos on YouTube did a terrible job. But this one provides, I think, a good and practical introduction. This video doesn't show how to construct a solar power generator, but it describes how it could be done. The content creator suggests floating a cork on the top of the water column with a magnet on top of the cork and then driving the magnet through a coil. Induction in the coil should tend to pull the cork off the top of the water column during the downstroke, but this would be a fun idea for mad scientists to play around with.
Anyway, enjoy!
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Fluidyne Engines
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