Recent content by jsh111

A candle carousel is a popular holiday time trinket that uses wooden if light metal vanes to rotate and assembly by using the heat created by burning a candle directly underneath. It occurred to me that this is a simple, albeit very inefficient heat engine. It resembles a rudimentary gas...

Clarification: I don't think I made this clear in the original posting: The idea here is not that I've come up with something genius that will change the world. If I wrote this up as an engineering project requirement, it would be something like: Design a simple electric generating system...

I've discussed gas turbines in other posts here, and the consensus is that they are simply very inefficient at small scale, and the cost is very high. There ARE some commercially availble, but you get into the $10k USD range for something like 5KW of power

I apologize, this is just a rough idea I wanted to expose. I suppose I didn't make it clear enough, but I thought the "crayon" drawing would convey that implicitly. The goal is not to make a "better engine" but to make something cheaply that would run on a variety of unclean fuels during...

Yes, I agree, a pressure relief valve is an absolute necessity connected to the burn/ expansion chamber. I probably should have included that in the rough block diagram above. A steam micro turbine is mechanically simple, but unless I am mistaken, micro steam turbines are not typically...

Background: In my opinion the next decade has great potential for difficult circumstances for worldwide. I have been obsessed with coming up with a small electrical power generation system (minimum 500 watt, goal is 1kW) for charging batteries during disaster relief situations where refined...

-Gas turbines, as a general rule require very high rotational speeds (tens of thousands of rpm for small tabletop models) in order to reach a self sustaining speed. Gas turbines are also limited to efficiency based on the pressure ratio generated by the compressor. -Question: What is...

Thank you for your reply, I am going to go off and investigate ram jets much more deeply. If you don't mind me asking another question, suppose in the above drawing the check valve were removed and back flow was now possible. Essentially what I would have now, I believe, is a piston version...

I created a crayon drawing to aid the discussion below: Basically if you have a blower of low pressure, and you blow it through a tube which has a very hot center, when the heat is added to the air, does the pressure of the air increase after passing by the fire, or is that impossible since...