Stirlingengineforum.com

You should be able to light up a CFL with a well built pop can stirling engine. First off this is all speculation on my part but by simple deduction following the utube videos it should work. The bedini motor can be run as a generator, it also produces an EFM back spike which can charge batteries or super capacitors. The joule thief circuit can take a dead 1.5v battery and light up an led .The super capacitor stores electricity something like a battery.
So you use the bedini CD with magnets as your flywheel. The bedini motor produces DC just like any other generator but also produces the EMF back spike which charges the super cap. When the super capacitor is fully charged you should get many hours of light from the CFL. Well go ahead and look at the utube videos doesn’t it seem workable? All of this stuff is really easy to build. I’ve made the bedini motor and joule thief. IN fact now you can get the joule thief free. The disposable cameras have a fuji circuit which is a joule thief. Once they remove the film they throw the housing with the circuit away. Everything else is from radio shack. The only reason I put the video of the earth battery up was to show what very low voltage and the joule thief can do.
http://youtu.be/5kL8ys8m0-4
http://youtu.be/mq9ZKDKDclY
http://youtu.be/9A6RAkSyfEQ
http://youtu.be/vR8wLDvXFYQ
http://youtu.be/0GVLnyTdqkg
http://youtu.be/KAakZTR_4LE

Not for many hours, I think that the smallest CFL I've found commonly available is about 7W, and I suspect that the average power (not peak) produced by a popcan Stirling will be in the order of milliWatts. There are losses too in the rectification of the pulse (voltage drop across the diode), and the small amount of power to run your joule thief. If you capture the power from the peak pulse output of your popcan stirling engine driven magneto I'd predict that it would take several hours of running to operate a 7W CFL for a minute or two, if even that.
My background (35 yrs) is avionics. Ron T

Shoot ! Thanks Ron. I was hoping it was the other way around. Load up the super cap quick and then run the light for a good long time.

The idea is interesting, I just joined up and hope to find similar projects but with more power output than a popcan engine would produce. It did bring some thoughts to mind as how to use popcans in a solar array to capture heat to run a larger engine. But mechanical engineering and machining are not my field. What we need is a very large popcan If I remember your original post, you mentioned something that I had thought about, making a flywheel that used rare earth magnets on a light weight disc instead of brass or aluminum.

Ron

RonT;

That first Idea was going to be just proof of theory. So there wouldn’t be much money involved. The Stirling engine I really want to build is Approtechies water bottle stirling engine. It uses a diaphragm instead of a power piston. You don’t need to be a machinest to build it. He gets 10 watts out of it straight up. Ive posted the utube links below. Is there anything to these bedini motors? I don’t believe they can run themselves ,what they call over unity,but is there anything to the EMF back spike they keep referring to? Also posted a couple of utube links on it.
http://youtu.be/m4cSpevEVpo
http://youtu.be/joUCcJhBm8U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2I9OoZs ... kGhugzVffw
http://youtu.be/kx8zXVLv-Yc
http://youtu.be/9fYHzJeKgTg
http://youtu.be/nlO8UDsc-Fc

The Stirling engine videos were interesting and with enough power output to light a CFL. There was room for improvements that could be done on the cheap. The engine design may be worth taking a second look at. Perhaps not today, but being new here I plan on putting in a post to ask about designs for home constructable engines in the 10 to 100W range, preferably solar powered to see if anyone is working along those lines.

The second set of videos on the home made Bedini engines failed to impress. Its another way of making a magneto it seems. The scope time base was set at 10ms per division so the spikes appeared to be under 1ms wide with a very very low duty cycle. The NE2 neon lamp triggers at around 90volts, and it's maximum current (without doing damage to it) is 0.6 mA, an insignificant amount of power. I get a chuckle out of some of these things, going to the trouble of cutting apart a TO3 transistor to gut it and install a socket for a TO220 style device socket on top of it, cute but why bother? Interesting as an art form maybe.

My time would be invested in the Stirling engine.

At the moment I'm at the company base in Red Deer, Alberta. On the weekend I'll be heading back to Yellowknife and home, and won't have as much time to participate in the forum. The morning temperatures this last week in Yellowknife were -33C on Friday morning and -32C on Saturday morning. A little extra temperature differential for a hot air engine to work with.

RonT, thanks for the responce. Lot to think about with solar ,fresnel lens or parabola reflector etc. How to follow the sun etc. Wish you the best. Hope you post here with any achievements.

fullofhotair wrote:You should be able to light up a CFL with a well built pop can stirling engine. First off this is all speculation on my part but by simple deduction following the utube videos it should work. The bedini motor can be run as a generator, it also produces an EFM back spike which can charge batteries or super capacitors. The joule thief circuit can take a dead 1.5v battery and light up an led .The super capacitor stores electricity something like a battery.
So you use the bedini CD with magnets as your flywheel. The bedini motor produces DC just like any other generator but also produces the EMF back spike which charges the super cap. When the super capacitor is fully charged you should get many hours of light from the led lights. Well go ahead and look at the utube videos doesn’t it seem workable? All of this stuff is really easy to build. I’ve made the bedini motor and joule thief. IN fact now you can get the joule thief free. The disposable cameras have a fuji circuit which is a joule thief. Once they remove the film they throw the housing with the circuit away. Everything else is from radio shack. The only reason I put the video of the earth battery up was to show what very low voltage and the joule thief can do.
http://youtu.be/5kL8ys8m0-4
http://youtu.be/mq9ZKDKDclY
http://youtu.be/9A6RAkSyfEQ
http://youtu.be/vR8wLDvXFYQ
http://youtu.be/0GVLnyTdqkg
http://youtu.be/KAakZTR_4LE

Unique technique to light CFL.. I have heard many other techniques of charging battery but this seems to be different one..

The subject matter is over my head, but I had to steal your statement for my signature. Yeehaaa

That reminds me of someone else's signature that I liked, probably on a Land Rover forum. It read, "If a hammer doesn't fix it then its an electrical problem". A month or so ago the boss had me flown across the lake to Hay River because he couldn't start the right engine on a small twin engine plane, even after the starter was replaced. A couple of hours later I'm back in Yellowknife, both planes are home again, and he asked me what the problem was. I said it wasn't an electrical problem, I fixed it with a hammer. Actually, as the starter solenoid was in a very difficult place to get at I wacked it a couple of times with a hammer and it worked well enough to start the engine and get the plane back to Yellowknife.

As for the larger pop cans, would that be allowed under the controlversial super sized pop drink ban in New York City?

Ron

RonT wrote:...I said it wasn't an electrical problem, I fixed it with a hammer.

I can use this at work, Im an electrician LOL!

What about an oil drum, I think we lost the thread in a crash a few years back, a German (I thick) chap had a beam engine using a 50 gal oil drum as the displacer cylinder, it was fairly slow. Ian S C

Ian SC
That is a real shame we lost that. That would have been a great video to see. The grampa of tin can stirling engines. Can you remember anything else about the engine. I though about using a 50 gal. barrel for the main cylinder body, but was told the thin metal couldnt take the pressure if scaled up to that size.

Sorry can't remember any more, it might be on u tube some where. What pressure, there's buzz all to worry about, it might not last too long, it will rust a bit quickly where it's heated, then it will just leak the air through the first bit to rust through. Ian S C

Interesting idea, using previously used metal barrels. A few years ago we lived in a house at a floatplane base. At times there would be empty fuel barrels stored there, they had no recycling value up here so quite a few would collect until they had to be removed. As they were capped and sealed, every night as the temperature dropped the air inside would contract and the ends of the barrels would "pop" inward. The process was reversed in the morning as they warmed up and "popped" outward. It would be relatively low pressure, but scale that up over a few hundred empty worthless barrels and you might have an unsightly but cheap source of power, before you were run out of the neighbourhood.