Think Pure Electric Vehicle Is Coming Back
August 6th, 2007Well, maybe not totally pure EV. Dean Kamen is working on a stirling engine addon to assist with battery charging.
But how is he running the stirling engine? Can anyone fathom out the answer to that? I’ve read about his stirling engine burning cow dung to produce electricity, but that fuel will be in short supply just about anywhere this car will be sold. HA
Also, what could the stirling engine be burning that would allow the thing to pass indoor air quality standards? Hydrogen???
But then, where would the hydrogen come from?
Anyway, does anyone out there know the answer to what’s fueling the stirling engine here?
Via: CNN:
But better batteries are only the beginning. If Dean Kamen has his way, the Think will change our relationship with the energy grid itself.
When I reach the top of a winding driveway leading to Westwind, Kamen’s estate outside Manchester, N.H., I’m greeted by an employee rolling along on a Segway. Then Kamen, dressed in jeans and short sleeves, a smartphone holstered on his hip, comes whipping around a corner on a small black motorcycle that sounds like the starship Enterprise going to warp factor 8. It’s an electric scooter equipped with a Stirling heat engine that is charging the vehicle’s battery, providing virtually greenhouse-gas-free travel.
The iconoclastic inventor, who made his first fortune developing medical devices, has spent more than $40 million creating Stirling engines that can tap almost any fuel source, from restaurant grease to cow dung. He wants to equip the City with one, extending its range by hundreds of miles.
Kamen met Willums about a year ago and later visited Think in Norway. “He’s a fun, gregarious, good guy,” Kamen says. “Next thing I know, I’m getting sucked into this, and he’s sending me a car, and — son of a bitch — I’ve got this car here and I’m putting a Stirling engine in!”
The navy-blue City is parked next to a 1913 Model T and an 1898 steam-driven car. Kamen opens a panel in the floor of the City’s cargo area to reveal a silver cylindrical object — a larger version of the Stirling engine that powers his scooter.
“You can plug the car into the wall to charge the batteries, or you can plug into this,” Kamen says, noting that when it’s connected to the City, his Stirling engine will meet indoor air-quality standards.
Kamen takes the City for a drive. “This little sucker will move,” he says, talking a mile a minute as he accelerates past his wind turbine and down a hill. Right now this is just a hobby for the inventor, but Kamen thinks the car could be the killer app to move toward his vision of the future: mass-produced Stirling engines powering the world’s off-the-grid villages.
If Kamen makes the Stirling work in an electric vehicle, Willums will get another power plant for his open-source car and a way to overcome drivers’ fears that they’ll run out of electrons in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s just the start. Both men see the City as part of a network of mobile generators that can draw energy from the power grid and send electricity back during periods of peak demand. “If you have enough Thinks out there, you would literally change the architecture of the grid,” Kamen says.
But for that to happen, you need a partner accustomed to managing vast amounts of data over global networks, a company like the one run by Kamen’s pals Brin and Page. A couple of days after my visit to his New Hampshire home, Kamen flies to California to have dinner with the Google guys, carrying the schematics of his Think/Stirling hybrid.
“They’re interested,” Kamen tells me the next week. “Sergey loved his old Think. He’s way enthusiastic about the new car.”
“Anyway, does anyone out there know the answer to what’s fueling the stirling engine here?”
Answer: Biogas, i.e. methane.
http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?p=2384
Stirling engines run off heat differentials. Any hot surface will do. Braking heat, road surface, or even the roof of the car (depending on the weather) could probably be used.
I’d be more concerned with the nominal output of the Stirling engine. I doubt you could charge a dead EV very quickly unless the available heat differential were fairly large. What would you do at night? Especially if you’re on a highway trip and braking heat is negligible.
Anyway I have no idea what the specs are on his Stirlings so I may be off base here…
does it come with a catheter tube? my brother has bad biogas, perhaps this would make him useful again……
or, a small suction device slowly moves bodyfat to the engine for, well, there would still be emissions. but the marketing would be phenomenally easy.
fast food restaurants can now dual biz as mini fuel stations. the waste from the food and garbage is shredded, then mixed with the waste grease. a small ‘ecologically prudent’ bucket is handed across the counter on return of the tray containing 2.5 liters of semi liquid waste to be put in the ass of the car. yes,it will be marketed as the car ass.
(sorry, the onion called, they wanted the bruised outer layer i seem to have found. happy trails.)
in all seriousness, the stirling engine will be something worth having around. if nothing else this car will potentially give a home a generator for ‘after the fact’ with quite a bit of flexibility. some home brew conversions for multiple objectives will look quite interesting.
interesting design here though:
http://www.stirlingenergy.com/whatisastirlingengine.htm
i like the conceptual simplicity of it, but the off hours still need a storage mechanism.