Working Model?

[Tom Waka]

Hello everyone,

    I found this group looking for steam engine designs to take to a machine shop to have built. I was curious if you fellows had made any progress since the forum posts I found from 2013. This seems like an excellent project, and I certainly hope it's been steaming along. Sorry, couldn't resist a terrible pun.

What I would like to build is a 25-HP twin-piston model, with the fly wheel located in the center. However, as I have no building experience, I am going to go ahead and hire a professional to do it. Speaking of which, if anyone here is interested in making a steam engine....

Also, do you know where to find original steam engines? The two or three I have found have been basically broken down rustbuckets, with owners who wanted $5,000+. I was hoping to find some more reasonable people out there, but most results are the little toy Jensens and such. I prefer real, working models.

Additionally, if anyone knows where a smaller steam engine/boiler is laying about, doomed for scrap, I would happily pick it up. I live in Portland, OR, but I have plenty of experience getting heavy items moved around the country.

Feel free to reply directly to my email, as I cannot promise I will remember to keep this tab open. 

tomwa...@gmail.com

[Josh Jordan]

I forgot about this project.  Was going to do an engine controller.  Had to focus on paying work or I'd have been homeless.  It never ends, I have not had time for a personal project.

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[Tom Waka]

Well that is disheartening! 

In any case, I have found what I was looking for. I hope this gets off the ground. Open Source is the future.

[Paul Passarelli]

Which design did you choose? Might you also be interested in a miniature radial? 

It's a high speed design that fits in a 5 gallon utility bucket. 1.200" bore & stroke, 12 cyls 8.5kW nominal.

I'm going to be looking for a contract manufacturer to produce these in quantity, but would welcome an enthusiast's input during the development of the design. 

--Paul

Paul Passarelli
Chairman & President
Pa...@SolarAndThermal.com
(203)846-2500 (main)  (213)207-6691 (direct)

Conference Call URL Dial in: 401-283-2721 PIN: 97176

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[Jason Learned]

Sounds interesting. How are you going to lubricate the engine?

[Mark Norton]

Lubrication is one of the little challenges that steam engines have.  Injecting oil is the classic solution, but leads to a lot of pollution.  Water lubrication is also possible, but greatly complicates the design of the engine.  I am told that there are modern coatings that can be applied to the piston rings that helps, but not if the engine will be used often and for long durations.

- Mark Norton

[Paul Passarelli]

Pressurized oil, and scavenger pump.  

--Paul

Paul Passarelli
Chairman & President
Pa...@SolarAndThermal.com
(203)846-2500 (main)  (213)207-6691 (direct)

Conference Call URL Dial in: 401-283-2721 PIN: 97176

The Light is Green!

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 8:35 AM, Jason Learned <jasonl...@gmail.com> wrote:

[ctyankee]

Anything ever come of this?

[Eerik Wissenz]

I am unsure, but I remain keenly interested in steam technology, especially when powered by solar thermal.

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Eerik Wissenz

[Paul Passarelli]

Hi Eerik,

  Is there any chance this is a concept you'd be interested in pursuing financially?

  I'm pursuing this as a project for the same reason they did in the 1800s -- to make MONEY.

  I have a design for a scalable high speed ORC engine that combines the ruggedness of old iron, and modern computer control to fill a broad yet niche market.  The generation of Reactive Volt-Amperes behind the meter so consumers of electricity can avoid Power Factor penalties from their utility.

  I'm seeking knowledgeable people who meet the criteria of *ACCREDITED INVESTORS*, or wealthy hobbyists that might wish to contribute, participate and engage in the efforts, to join me in this endeavor.

  The problem I've been facing is that disreputable practitioners like Cyclone Power have poisoned the well.

  Let me know if you're interested, if not, no hard feelings.

--Paul

Paul Passarelli
Chairman & President
Pa...@SolarAndThermal.com
(203)846-2500 (main)  (213)207-6691 (direct)

Conference Call URL Dial in: 401-283-2721 PIN: 97176

The Light is Green!

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-source-steam/CANdVdgH4dUwpjuhGJUiBGCtkkfRyuLg6%2B-AczzLahhCCUM%3DrFQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason Learned]

Hello Tom,

The only thing I found when things fell apart, mainly from an engineer telling everyone how impractical it was, was a manufacturer in India. He makes small steam engines. I think the same from the British days, because the original measurements were in inches. Here is his website, I think they were a lot less than 5,000 but I don't know now. https://www.tinytechindia.com/product/renewable-energy-equipments/steam-engines/42

Good luck,

Jason

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[Eerik Wissenz]

I worked with the Tiny Tech steam engine some years ago and developed for Tiny Tech a roughly 30 square meter reflector to generate steam.

Two videos I made about it are here:

https://youtu.be/CXJgAmft2jI

https://youtu.be/yxFSyYtn2YQ

The reflector we measured at about 20 KW at high steam pressure, but to run the steam engine at load would haver required 3 such machines.

Instead of building 2 more, 200 000 USD of materials and a whole year was spent building 9 reflectors 3 times bigger, both against my strongest possible advice (smaller modular machines make far more sense to start out commercially and there was no reason to believe a 90m^2 version would be cheaper, due to the exponential cost of building towers and accuracy of reflections decreasing on a cosine curve; I had spent some trouble to work-out that 30m^2 was likely a cost optimum given the fabrication methods available; and refusing my at designing a bigger version so it would at least work).

I have some photos of the 90 m^2, but the reason there's no version online is because it was a disaster and then scrapped. When they couldn't make it work they finally asked me to come to try to fix it. Unfortunately due to the exponential cost of building towers they couldn't make a tower of a proportional size so decided the way to deal with that is make a smaller tower (rendering the machine at best a 50 m^2 machine). The 200 000 USD being wasted the whole development had to be scrapped.

You maybe wondering the reason for this madness, and the answer to that question was that a new machine that I had no part in designing was necessary to cut me out of royalties that I wasn't demanding or asking for. My goal at that time was to transfer the technology to a structure that could continue the development and commercialize it. Had we demonstrated continuous steam power I'm confident enough units would be sold, even just as a development platform.

As for the steam engine itself, it's based on a UK kit that was available at the time, and not even the whole kit, but just the shop drawings to Finnish the machining (the product was unfinished pieces for hobbyists to finish the machining of, or at least one version of the product, but the shop drawings to do the finishing was available for free; dimensions that did not appear in those shop drawings--as not all pieces needed finishing on all the surfaces, or at all--were basically just guessed at).

So definitely could have been made more efficient, but it did at least work and in a configuration where the waste heat is utilized the efficiency does not necessarily matter (they did sell units powered by wood and charcoal, and had a boiler for that).

Generally speaking, if you want to get steam power really going the focus should be on making the cheapest possible solar thermal energy, which then creates the market for steam engine, and for developing markets where cottage industry scale makes commercial sense in a lot of industries but also the labour to build and maintain this kind of technology isn't a problem (automation can then be perfected over time to deploy in higher-labour cost environments).

What you see in the video above is in my opinion the cheapest way to produce solar thermal energy for the scale of a small steam engine.

In publishing the video I thought people would anyways easily reverse engineer and build copies of the machine, but probably seeing Tiny Tech not continuing the development dissuaded copy cats.

However, if there's interest I could find and put together all the designs and, most importantly the original open source software as mentioned in the patent:

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015004330A1/fi

Which, again, I wrote to protect and encourage continuing the open source development, but it simply faded off the internet.

My goal with Lytefire was to prove the commercial use of the technology (the main obstacle in my view to inspiring copy cats is proving the commercial use), and even after succeeding in that ... well there are a few copy cats I became informed about but they did not understand what to do, trying to make their own improvements that are counter productive.

Unfortunately Lytefire was infiltrated and then taken over by organized crime as it was key in a fake consortium used to launder hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars out of Africa and elsewhere.

You can read about that here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SXU6VkygIWM14S4O-IQQUhlz41qYBjFH?usp=share_link

So feel free to enquire if you want to see if you can help get all the above knowledge documented and open sourced. The original open source designs are key to avoid patent harassment, and the author of the patent re-publishing everything that was open source at the time (and therefore still open source) would be of immense legal benefit; so yes, do feel welcome to just go ahead and reverse engineer the technology anyways, but even if you're as good as me you're work would have legal risks that are really best to solve by a proper documentation of what was open source at the time (some such material literally pampthlets published for various events, which I'm pretty sure I have the only copy).

What's absolutely critical to really break the cost barrier to solar thermal energy is building things out of wood.

Talk I did summarizing all those points is available here: https://youtu.be/q3WeRU8geSs

[Paul Passarelli]

Hi Eerik,

  Looks like they put you through the wringer.  What do you hope to gain by pursuing the losses? At some point you just have to walk away from the aggravation that will not lead to recovery of anything.

  I'm not claiming any altruistic motives, but I also won't be ripped off.  I've walked away from attempts to steal what I have, and I've turned down money that was basically a way to launder political contributions for Democrats.

  You seem to have a knack for raising $$$, and if that's still something you'd be willing to do, then perhaps I can convince you to raise some to fund my innovations.  It's not flashy, the engine doesn't wheeze and make satisfying thunketa-thunketa noises or spit droplets & vapors.  It's not quite as soulless as a turbine spinning silently in its case, but close.

  As for the panels, unlike your array with 360 individual adjustments, which are very cool, but impractical at large scale, every trough is identical, they come off the machine at many meters per second.  Just one single manufacturing cell capable of producing >600MW(e) or ~2GW(th) per year.

  The whole system is designed for the lowest possible LCOE. That's it.  That was the original goal back in 2001, and it's the only thing that has not changed in 25 years.  If people had trusted my predictions back then, they and I would all be multi billionaires by now. But they didn't believe solar power was 'practical'.  Why didn't I pursue it myself? Because "A chasm cannot be lept in multiple hops."  But, twenty five years has altered the landscape.  And there are now new paths to get from one side to the other.

  I don't pretend to be shrewd, slick, and as I mentioned the tech is not sexy, it's practical.  I'm not Harry Schoel, I won't lure investors with images of boats, or a shiny red dome.  I won't expense things that have nothing to do with the project.  I won't claim water is a lubricant, or suggest that some type of spidery mechanical contraption that can only bang itself to smithereens is going to miraculously have a 'service lifetime'.

  What I do promise is transparency.  Real transparency for partners & investors.  And this *WILL NOT* be open source.  We may license third party manufacturers, there will be more patents, but there will also be trade secrets for as long as they last and can be continuously improved upon.  But in the end, sales, licensing, royalties, maintenance contracts are going to propel this into a major corporation.  We can be generous & kind when we're wealthy enough to afford it.  As for me, all I really want is a research budget grand enough to fit my imagination; someday.

Whaddya think?

 

--Paul

Paul Passarelli
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Pa...@SolarAndThermal.com
(203)846-2500 (main)  (213)207-6691 (direct)

Conference Call URL Dial in: 401-283-2721 PIN: 97176

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P.S. All Serious Inquiries Welcome.

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[Eerik Wissenz]

Dear Paul Passarelli,

Pardon my French but you are an absolute fucking moron.

First, to give someone advice with my experience legal advice without A. bothering to go over the evidence, B. asking a single question to be sure you understand anything to begin with and C. even reading what I did write just now, is just dumb.

Nowhere do I talk about pursuing any damages, so that is just made up entirely in your head.

For Tiny Tech, if you perceive yourself to be talking about them as that was the point of my email responding to the person mentioning their steam engine, my goal was to give them the technology for free and without any royalty whatsoever, on my own dime to travel there and pay for personal expenses. That they wanted to cut me out of the 0% royalty I was asking was because greed has so corrupted the mind of man that they could not A. realize someone asking 0% need not be cutout if we look at things mathematically and B. paying me a minimum would avoid things like wasting countless hours of shop time and 200 000 USD of materials (I could have designed a 90m^2 reflector that at least actually worked for like a few grand).

As for my own company and the money laundering (which I completely expected to run foul of the mob sooner or later in doing business in Africa), the issue there is called being murdered as a witness to hundreds of millions of blood diamond money laundering.

The point of the company was to simply prove the commercial viability of the technology, which it did, so mission accomplished.

The cheapest way to build the technology is by hand, by local crafts people, without a Western engineering company acting as a middle man.

People are ignorant, greedy, corrupt and especially considering this genocide in plain sight, indeed rubbed in our faces, arguably undeserving of anything but environmental collapse. 

As for your technical criticisms, Lytefire.com sells commercially successful reflector technology, and as you note yourself you have developed nothing.

There is no need for large scale solar.

Local gardens and artisans and cottage industries powered by solar thermal can easily satisfy all of humanity.

I am no longer in a position to continue the open source development track, but if someone here wants to, feel free to contact me privately (simply to avoid reading more foolishness).

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-source-steam/CADn-Cyc5xq0cv-iXaK7CpcmJ9Cu%3Drgd4SgPaMPraeqxNWg784g%40mail.gmail.com.

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Eerik Wissenz

[Paul Passarelli]

Greetings Eerik Wissenz,

  Thank you for clearing the air.  I started reading a tiny bit of that wall of text.  I got the impression you were ripped off and were obsessed with getting some prosecutor to pursue a case against someone that appears to be judgement proof, and way out of your league when it comes to scamming people out of their rightful property.  My friendly 'advice' was because I perceived that you are thinking like the tiny chihuahua barking at a pride of lions, and might be wise to walk away.  Did I miss the gory details? Idunno. I stopped reading after 5 minutes.

  As for the rest, I did say I thought your array was clever, but it's still impractical.  And your own experimental runs in the video demonstrated that it only performs at a fraction of what you expected.

  And then you called me "an absolute fucking moron". Go pound sand. 

  You wrote: The cheapest way to build the technology is by hand, by local crafts people, without a Western engineering company acting as a middle man.

  

That may be so, but only because the value of third world labor is vanishingly close to nothing.

You wrote: "Local gardens and artisans and cottage industries powered by solar thermal can easily satisfy all of humanity."  

Maybe in your world, but not in mine.

If hobbyists are the only people pursuing this dream, then I apologize to all.  

If there are professional people here monitoring, lurking, (or simply visiting from the future,) then know that there is (or was) a potential opportunity to be had.

If someone here wants to look beyond open source to produce truly useful quantities on energy and actual wealth, you can contact me publicly, or privately if you still feel the need to virtue signal and don't want anyone to know.

--Paul

Paul Passarelli
Chairman & President
Pa...@SolarAndThermal.com
(203)846-2500 (main)  (213)207-6691 (direct)

Conference Call URL Dial in: 401-283-2721 PIN: 97176

The Light is Green!

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[Eerik Wissenz]

Dear Paul,

If you aren't going to read what I wrote, which was not directed at you but answering the comment about the Tiny Tech steam engine, then why bother imagining you know what you are talking about?

As for the performance of the technology in the video, for the benefit of anyone else following so that it's clear, the roughly 30 m^2 reflector in the video performed as expected at 20 KW power at high pressure steam.

What didn't perform well was Tiny Tech then building a 3 times larger machine and encountering exactly the problem I told them they'd encounter which is that building towers is exponentially expensive. It was still completely doable but the Tiny Tech owner was also fixated on the idea that the power to volume ratio for a wood boiler should be maintained for a solar reflector; I tried many times to explain that it's a different heat transfer process and there is not really a relation to the formula of boiler volumes for wood boiler, but to no avail, which made building the tower even more expensive and also dangerous. We were no stranger to danger, however, water hammer having blown out all the cylinder head bolts from the steam engine (running on the mentioned wood boiler) during this time.

I will find the photos of this 90m^2 version and it will be clear what I mean.

So this 200 000 $ (and a whole year of factory time) technical misadventure is simply unfortunate for the reasons I explained above, but had the machine I designed simply been replicated then Tiny Tech would have the steam engine at continuous load demonstration they wanted, and would have gotten a lot more press and likely start selling units, at a fraction of the price and time they invested in cutting me out of my outrageous 0% royalty (I didn't invent the technology, was just voyaging the world trying to give it away as it seemed clearly useful to be out there). 

The point of all that is to provide some context to the video, which if anyone on the mailing list is still interested in open source steam, the key to unlocking a steam punk sustainable future is lowering the cost of solar steam so low that it enables breaking the path dependency of the engine industry by creating the demand for smaller reciprocating steam engines.

Why smaller scale (10's of kilowatts) is superior to large scale (hundreds of megawatts) is mainly because the one thing solar thermal provides that PV doesn't is heat at useful temperatures for a wide range of thermal processes; aka. combined heat and power. Putting giant systems in the desert "sounds reasonable" but is just throwing the thermal energy away, putting sensitive equipment in extreme conditions, and maintenance is a real problem as people don't tend to live out in the middle of the desert, in addition to needing transmission lines and so on, to power cities that have no other use than to transform petrochemicals efficiently into waste products (wasted souls most of all).

Place solar thermal technology on the garden / farm / village level, and all these problems are solved, in particular it making sense for people to be in intimate relationship with the machine in order to take care of it.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-source-steam/CADn-CydwCTw-ZscULRvhxKoRDNW6iwh1FVSqzbJgno54sjvUew%40mail.gmail.com.

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Eerik Wissenz