Dean Kamen's Magic Stirling Engine

...the Stirling, was invented in 1816 by Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling. He found that alternately heating and cooling gases in a closed system could create power to do work, such as drive a piston. But...the Stirling was mostly forgotten, even though its simple concept is “elegant, it’s brilliant,” Kamen says. But its time to shine might be now. All-electric cars still suffer from wimpy batteries that limit driving range and refuel slowly. “The energy you can carry around in a liter of gasoline is 100 times higher than you can carry in the same size and weight of a battery,” Kamen says. “And that’s going to be true for a long time.” _CSMonitor_via_Keelynet

The Stirling engine has long been a solution looking for a problem. But inventor Dean Kamen seems to have found more than one good use for the venerable heat engine.

Mr. Kamen, an inventor and entrepreneur perhaps best known for the two-wheel Segway Human Transporter, doesn’t want to get into the car business himself. He just wants to see the Stirling engine that helps power the REVOLT be mass produced for vehicles. That would drive down the price, he says, and allow it to be cost-effective in another role: as a miniature electric plant for villages in the developing world.

A Stirling can run on just about anything that creates heat, from gasoline, kerosene, and ethanol, to natural gas, propane, hydrogen, and, yes, the methane given off by animal manure.

In a recent test, two villages in Bangladesh ran Stirling engines to create electricity for 24 weeks – using only cow dung for fuel. “We’re pretty excited about that,” Kamen says. _CSMonitor

The best power plant for a hybrid automobile will be a fuel cell running on a simple liquid fuel like methanol. The next best power plant may very well be a Stirling engine -- which can be available in quantity now, unlike the fuel cell which will take a few more years of development to perfect. Hybrid cars need a constant power source for charging the batteries. Stirling engines can plug away at constant speed, day after day, year after year, without complaint.

Using a sophisticated internal combustion engine in a serial hybrid automobile is expensive and unnecessary. A turbine engine would be ideal except for the expense, the noise, and its sensitivity to teenage driving habits. The Stirling makes sense, until low cost methanol powered fuel cells are perfected for autos. Even then, cost factors may well favour the Stirling.

These issues will not be settled in the US auto market, due to the massive amount of regulation crushing the US auto industry. But the rest of the world may begin to gain confidence, as the Obama depression wears on, killing the US economy and US credibility in world markets.

Portrait of a Male Mind

The male mind is oriented outward, toward problems in the larger world. Other than perhaps Ray Kurzweil, there is no more prominent example of the problem-solving nature of the male mind than inventor Dean Kamen. Esquire presents an engaging portrait of the inventor and what his male mind is focusing on currently.

... there's nothing so soothing as cutting a piece of steel when it's late and you can't sleep because you're trying to work out some problem in your head. Because machines are more than machines, they're a road map to the people who built them. They tell you what kind of problems they had and what they wanted. Just as Kamen's inventions are his own autobiography in steel -- every one designed to cheat gravity, to declare independence, to make every man the king of his own empire.

He leads the way to the cupola at the top and watches the sunset, chattering happily. This is why he never got married or had children. He loves being away from everywhere, completely alone. He can watch planes land at the airport. He can watch the weather change. And it doesn't bother him that he usually comes home at nine or ten and drops into bed exhausted. It's like the private island he rarely visits, the girlfriend he rarely sees, the vacations he never takes. It's the idea that counts. Just knowing he has it is enough. Anyway, what should he stop doing? FIRST? Water? Power? Medical equipment? "I can't stop," he says. "As a practical matter, I can't put the world on hold."

He really can't. There's just too much he wants to do. When he proved that FIRST worked, he was sure it would be in every school in the country the next year. Same with the Segway. It's 100 percent more efficient than cars, those metal boxes designed for the open road when 50 percent of the people alive live in cities. It's just stupid. It's lunacy. And someday, the Slingshot will go into production, too. And one of the kids from FIRST will win the Nobel prize or cure cancer. But it takes time for an innovation to become a commodity. Because the Wright brothers flew a plane and it was a long time before frequent-flier miles. You have to be patient, give the world time to catch up.

For fun, he's starting to dream about something that flies. A new form of personal transportation. It will be, he says, Dumplonian. It will empower the individual.

Some kind of helicopter?

"Not a helicopter," he says, staring intently at the helicopter. "I've got a couple of ideas." He smiles, turning inward for a moment, lost in the vision of a new machine. _Esquire

When thinking about such inventor-spirits, only a few names come to mind after one remembers Edison, Bell, Marconi, Tesla, Carver, Burbank, Turing, von Neumann. But there are many lesser known inventors, and some destined to become legends. Besides Kamen and Kurzweil, there are Lonnie Johnson, John Kanzius, and a host of others in America alone.

Almost all of them are men. There have also been women inventors, since a woman's mind is as clever as a man's on average. Temple Grandin is an example, although being an autistic may place her mind closer to the male mode of thought. But historically, the female mind has focused upon issues close at hand, of more immediate practical or esthetic use. The male mind will typically cast farther afield for ideas, connections, and implications--and into the more distant past and future.

So even now, in a time when feminists have sacked the university and made the public sphere virtually uninhabitable in many ways for men who are themselves, or who dare to speak their minds--now is as good a time as any to celebrate the world transforming potential of the male mind.




H/T Kurzweilai.net

Visionaries, Inventors, Engineers, and the People Who Actually Get Things Done

Nanotechnology theorist and visionary Eric Drexler has played a vital part in bringing the promise and danger of molecular assembly to the public's attention. But he has never actually built a molecular assembler. This is the nature of today's important advances in "nanotechnology:"

A new high-resolution positioning & scanning system providing 25 picometers resolution is available.
The minute P-363 PicoCubeÆ, together with its low noise E-536 driver / controller, provide significantly higher resolution and positional stability than previous multi-axis scanning stages.

How Do PicoCubeÆ Scanners Differ from Traditional Scanner Tubes?
PicoCube systems were designed to overcome the limitations of open-loop piezo-tube based scanners which provide high resolution motion but poor linearity and trajectory guidance.
The compact PicoCube is based on exceptionally robust, high-stiffness piezo drives rather than tubes and employs non-contact, direct-measuring, parallel-metrology capacitive sensors for position feedback. The low-inertia drives allow for a resonant frequency of 10 kHz, important for high speed scanning applications

Source

Such devices are useful for atomic force microscopy and nano-manipulation. Of course, such devices are nothing like a molecular assembler, and can certainly not make copies of themselves. Nevertheless, they are useful in the slow and incremental study of molecular/atomic scale forces and structures. They are designed by engineers, and manufactured by machines and human assemblers.

Drexler's books help to stimulate the imaginations of the people who will actually make the breakthroughs leading to molecular assembly. Drexler is a visionary.

Dean Kamen and Ray Kurzweil function as both visionaries and inventors. They conceive new ideas, and work with their teams to actually develop working devices and machines. Of course, all successful modern inventors work with teams of engineers, craftsmen, attorneys, accountants, financiers, and other vital members of a modern enterprise.

Steve Wozniak served as visionary, inventor, and engineer. But Steve Jobs provided other useful skills that helped the company get off the ground. Other less well known members of the team likewise played vital roles.

In every research lab there are technicians and craftsmen who fabricate tools, software, and equipment that are necessary for testing ideas, and for refining ideas that show promise. Visionaries and inventors cannot do without them.

In reality, visionaries are a dime a dozen. Anyone can think of ideas, as long as the ideas do not have to work or be important. It is the visionaries who think of important ideas that could actually work, who are in demand--or they should be. Positioning is also important, as is who they know and how well they can stick to their purpose. Because a good visionary needs a good team, if anything is ever going to get done.

One of the major problems with a society improving itself, is the setting of priorities in the financing of innovations. In a socialist society, priority-setting occurs at fairly high levels in government committees, and nationalised industries. That is why nations such as North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela see little if any innovation. China saw very little innovation while the Communist Party held its rigid grip on economic planning and enterprise. Russia's neo-nationalisation of oil, gas, and other profitable industries is certain to reduce innovation in that unfortunate country. Theocracies such as Iran demonstrate the same lack of innovation as socialist and other centrally controlled societies.

The more free-wheeling a society's economy, the more innovation that will be seen from the bottom up. It is no accident that revolutionary scale innovations in western nations are more rare, as the nations' economies grow more centralised.

But revolutionary innovations are what prevents economic stagnation. The evolution toward nanny states and greater nationalisation and centralisation of enterprise and innovation suggests that stagnation is coming. Certainly if a person is cared for from the cradle to the grave, regardless of his productive contribution to society, the incentive of that person to innovate will be reduced.

Many idle visionaries dream of a society where machines do all the work, and well-entitled humans sit around composing music, poetry, or producing great art. It may happen that the humans will be well cared for materially, but it is unlikely that most such persons would bother creating anything meaningful. What would be the point? More likely such persons would crave entertainment, amusement, and all manner of pleasure. If most people do not have to work at anything, they will not.

There are ways of educating children to actually want to create, innovate, and produce remarkable things. Those are not ways that most children are educated--and there is no conceivable way that today's education system could evolve into the other educational methods I allude to.

Sadly, today's education creates psychological neotenates--grown children with no experience of meaningful life responsibility or practical skills. University faculties are populated by psychological neotenates, as are civil service jobs, welfare roles, and prison cells.

Homes from Dirt; Energy from Dung; Clean Water from Piss

Yes, it is true. It is possible to provide solid shelter, clean water, and reliable electricity from dirt, dung, and piss. Can you think of many places that significant numbers of humans live where there is not ample supply of all three?

Dean Kamen--successful college dropout, inventor extraordinaire--provides the means to make energy from dung or other bio-combustibles, and pure water from piss--or any impure water source. The ingenious devices that provide clean water and plentiful energy can be mass produced cheaply, and transported anywhere.

Houses from dirt are rather easily made using small portable machines to compress earthen brick. I made many such bricks of earth in helping to build such a house in the mountains of the western US. It is a house I would not mind living in myself.

The missing ingredient is food--but where there are clean water and plentiful energy, it is quite possible to grow food.

Wealthy inventor Dean Kamen does not hesitate to drink his own urine(!)--once it has passed through his patented "Slingshot" purification system. He does this in front of audiences to convince them that it is possible to do away with water-born illness around the globe. Would George Bush or Nancy Pelosi drink their own urine to help make the world a better place? Interesting question.

There should be no shortage of clean water, no homeless people, no one without electricity, no one without food. The only real shortages existing are shortages of intelligence, ingenuity, cooperation, and tolerance for other religions and ideologies. Dean Kamen has provided the ingenuity for plentiful freshwater and energy--no matter how remote the village. Ingenuity for building solid earthen homes is within the grasp of almost anyone--even a social science professor or journalist.