Parabolic Dish Stirling Engine at Sandia National Laboratories

in this project we're trying to make good use of the Sun for generation of bulk power and we reflect the sun's rays using a parabolic dish onto the hot portion of a heat engine and we use that collected heat then to turn the engine and that in turn turns a generator and generates great electricity your engine in your car is a heat engine it basically takes Heat and converts it to mechanical engine energy in your car we call it an internal combustion engine in our case it's an external combustion engine we expand gasses inside the engine but we do it by applying heat externally so we have an array of tubes that the sunlight is focused on and that expand that has a gas flowing through it and a gas expands and that moves the piston which in turn turns the crankshaft I've been working in concentrating solar power mirror technology for 20 years I figured if we made a better heat engine or a better receiver for that heat engine the part that receives the energy and transfers it to the engine that the right components would bring the right people together and somebody would make a system Stirling energy systems has taken up an old technology from the early 80s and they're modernizing that technology putting some of our best technologies into that system and developing it into a commercial product they are looking at both power generation whereas in the past we've imagined dish systems would be used for remote or end-of-the-line Grid applications with one or two dishes in a single facility SDS is approach is radically different in that they want to deploy as many as twenty thousand dishes in one location one of the keys to our success here is our collaboration with Stirling energy systems no money is crossing the threshold we are providing in-kind engineering services to SES and they but most of their engineering staff here on site in a technology incubator to learn about the hardware and to develop it in cooperation with Sandia but SES is picking up the bulk of the the finances for the system they own the hardware and they pay their engineers there's no contract in place so it's an exciting way to do business it's different than anything we've done before but it looks like it's an effective way for technology transfer

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 34,903

Keywords: Sandia, National, Labs;, recruiting;, work;, job;, creativity;, science;, technology, climate;, energy;, transportation;, engineering;, SNL;, security;, super, computers;, research;, R&D;, nanotechnology;, physics;, lasers;, nuclear;, biotechnology;, chemical;, chem-bio

Id: AdCNnSdtU7U

Length: 2min 51sec (171 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2010