Find Hansen's miniature engines

Martin Hodge

These are amazing works of art to me.

[video=youtube_share;UGksYSwFucI]

NWCCTV

amazing works of art

That is quite amazing.

LoopyByteloose

Appears to be a model of a Sterling engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine

They got me into researching them for a few weeks as I thought they might be useful for a solar air conditioning power source. One at least needs fans to move the air. It is something that might be possible, but when you rate a/c in the equivalent of tons of ice, the question comes down to where are you going to store 2 tons of water/ice in your home in order to get daily cooling needs met.

I suppose one could build a cellar just to store the ice and duct it up through the house. But you still need quite a bit of refrigerant if you aren't having a compressor drive the fluid. Add another big tank for that into your cellar. Pretty soon the whole device takes up a lot of space. The sterling engine would likely go on the roof, and it is hard to get them in more than a few horsepower.

Ron Czapala

Check out this miniature Nitro V8

localroger

No Loopy, this is an internal combustion Diesel style engine. It's a style that hasn't ben built regularly for a long time but you see variants especially for ship propulsion around the turn of the 20th century. Some were created by converting steam engines, and it is a feature of the design that the cylinder pressures are low, in the 300 PSI range, so that the parts are subjected to minimal strain. The hot bulb is necessary to preheat the fuel so that it will self ignite at relatively low pressure, and the pre-heater seen inthe demo is normally turned off after the engine has been running because the engine's heat of operation takes its place.

Mark_T

Lovely.

Had a hunch, so Googled "miniature Merlin engine":

Scaled down Rolls-Royce Merlin, complete with supercharger:
http://www.enginehistory.org/ModelEngines/merlin_xx.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xe1LL1IC7Y