A Report On The Stirling Engine

The majority of biomass power plants use direct combustion. In a cogeneration facility the steam from the boiler is captured to heat water and buildings. Although this is a dependable technology it only achieves a thermal efficiency of 20%. This can, however, be increased by cogeneration or by co-firing which is the burning of biomass along with coal. Another method being used is gasification of biomass.

Biomass energy is a renewable energy source from living or recently living plant and animal materials which can be used as fuel. There are many ways in which we could produce this energy such as heat and steam. Also, instead of leaving waste in landfills, we’re reusing that waste and converting it into usable power. Pros: 1. Renewable. 2. Dependency on Fossil Fuels is Reduced 3. Protects air quality 4. Improves forest health. Cons: 1. Not 100% clean. 2. Requires a lot of water. 3. Not as efficient as fossil fuels.

In the article, the Burning Question, the issue of biomass energy via wood pellets was brought to question. This subject has deeply divided scientists, primarily from the chemistry and environmental science disciplines, economists, and politicians. Currently the use of wood pellets for energy, under the European Union, is classified as a carbon-neutral fuel. The argument for this designation lies in the regeneration of trees to take up the carbon released from burning past trees. However, many scientists call foul, basing their argument on the substantial lag period between burning trees and the regeneration of them. This period has led many to worry that such actions will worsen the current global warming crisis. Biomass energy plants produce,

To solve the rigorous threat to earth from global warming, bio-fuels serve as the most feasible source of energy all over the world. The environmental and economical performance of bio-fuel as compared to fossil fuel was analyzed by full Life Cycle Analyses (LCA) in Spain. The Spanish government CIEMAT, carried out two LCA’s so as to compare ethanol-ethanol mixtures with gasoline, and biodiesel-biodiesel mixtures with fuel oil according to ISO 14040-43 standards, these standards evaluate energy and mass balance for two or more objects. It was concluded that carbon dioxide emission during utilization of bio-fuel are lower than fossil fuel and bio-fuel requires less primary energy to be processed than fossil fuels. Bob Dinneen, President and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association submitted the letter to the editor of The Gazette in which he marked that “On an environmental level, conventional ethanol is reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 34% compared to petroleum, including hypothetical land use change emissions” (qtd. in renewable fuel association). As the raw material for

Biomass is the entire mass of organisms in a certain area or section, which can be used as fuel to convert to electricity. When plants absorb energy from the sun and carbon dioxide from the air, the chlorophyll in the plants transform this raw energy into food, which is called photosynthesis. The process of photosynthesis gives the plant the needed energy to live, which is passed to the next consumer of energy. Because the energy used to keep every organism on Earth alive comes from the sun, when the organic matter is burned it releases the stored energy from the sun, which can be transformed into electrical energy. Although burning biomass to obtain the heat energy used to receive the needed electrical energy releases carbon dioxide, the energy source is available anywhere, unlike wind, hydroelectric, ocean, geothermal, and solar energy, which makes it available to anyone and cuts back on expenses to transport the energy. If

Fossil fuels are finite resources and once those are used up we need a way to continue living regularly, as our lives are built upon the ability to harness energy and produce electricity. As technology increases, alternative types of energy have become more and more enticing. Renewable energy is a very controversial topic today and has been around since the industrial revolution. Prior to the Revolution, which started in Britain in the late 1700s, manufacturing products was often done through the use of hand tools or basic machines in people’s homes. From the 18th to 19th centuries industrialization marked a shift to powered, specialty machinery, factories and mass production, all of which are used today to help with the processing of renewables.

If St. Paul were to switch from our conventional (separate) heating and power systems to a CHP (combined heat and power) system, immense amounts of energy could be saved and repurposed (1). A conventional system is roughly 49% efficient (lost energy due to transport, heat loss) and that a CHP system would be between 75-80% efficient (1). An improvement of 30% in our energy production would reduce emissions, costs, and the need to purchase power. This idea of a CHP is great for the large scale, but not entirely feasible for the St. Paul Campus. The director of the steam plant, Joshua Svejcar, stated that the St. Paul Campus simply does not use enough energy (5MW) for a CHP to be feasible. Another project that ought to be considered would be converting steam to hot water. This is considered “low-grade heat” and would retain more heat during transport, thus reducing waste (1). Yet another fascinating idea occurs in the Dairy Barn on the St. Paul Campus. If we implemented a biodigester which can turn waste to heat, the amount of manure and waste from the Dairy Barn would be enough to sustainably power itself (1). This would also remove large amounts of methane emissions from the St. Paul Campus (1).

How does biomass work? Our project is on Biomass Energy. Biomass energy is a renewable energy resource from living or recently living plants or animals materials which can be used as fuel. Many different types of biomass is wood, dead plants, dead animals, garbage, corn. Biomass is a renewable energy source because the energy in it comes from the sun, but also because biomass/bioenergy can grow again over a short period of time compared with the long time that it takes to grow fossil fuels. Through the process of photosynthesis, chlorophyll in plants captures the sun's energy by converting carbon dioxide from the water and air from the ground into carbohydrates. When burned, they turn back into water and carbon dioxide and release the energy

Biomass is the use of organic matter to make electricity. Organic matter such as trees and plants are burned and heat water to create steam. The steam created from boiling water is used to turn turbines to create electricity. Biomass can also be used to create Methane which is used to create even more electricity.

The Biomass energy is an organic matter that is used by photosynthesis. This is used to generate energy and the most common energy is coming from the wood of the trees, corn, municipal solid waste, and sugarcane. The biomass is used to create ethanol, biodiesel, bio oil and biogas. This in turns create electricity with steam turbines and gasifies to produce heat. The advantage of using the biomass over the fossil fuel is that biomass is a renewable carbon source, zero net carbon dioxide emissions, lower methane, sulfate, and hydrocarbon emissions, and the most important is no dependence on foreign oil. Another is the geothermal energy, in which it uses the heat from the earth to warm things up. The common source is cost effective, reliable, and environmentally friendly. The main sources of uses are to heat homes, greenhouse, industrial process heating mineral recovery, fisheries and also mitigate global warnings. Geothermal energy is more valuable than the fossil fuels because it is an inexhaustible energy source, lot less emissions in the atmosphere, more efficient than solar energy, work under any kinds of weather conditions. The fossil fuels are irreplaceable, create massive environmental pollution and are also causes the major factor of the global warming and the ozone layer depletion. Also the Biomass and the Geothermal are very inexpensive compare to the fossil fuels by almost 50 percent.

The stirling engine required a tremendous amount of time and materials to be built. The sterling engine that was created was divided into two distinctive parts. Each part had materials that were arranged in a specific order to increase the chances of the stirling engine working. The first part of the stirling engine contained the bottom can with the attached pipe and the second part contained the steel wool that was used as a displacer. Even after the sterling was fully constructed it was unable to work.

Fossil fuel power stations have rotating machinery to convert the heat energy of combustioninto mechanical energy, which then operates an electrical generator. The prime mover may be a steam turbine, a gas turbine or, in small plants, a reciprocating internal combustionengine. All plants use the energy extracted from expanding gas - steam or combustion gases. A very few MHD generators have been built which directly convert

With the help of new technologies and studies, these old energy sources are becoming more popular as time goes on. The growth of sustainable energy, which includes Solar, Wind, Biomass, Biogas, and Geothermal, has become a major factor in the business of supplying

In the world of global warming, all kinds of pollution and fuel shortages going on, renewable and clean/ green energy is increasingly the ideal solution of energy related problems we have to solve one way or another. Biofuel is one of the mainstream and highly supported solutions nowadays, an idea to make renewable fuel by living organisms such as fiber, corn, vegetable oil or sugar cane. Unlike nonrenewable fossil fuels over extracted by people causing various environmental problems like generating a considerable amount greenhouse gas, current technology already lets renewable fuel like biofuels to shrink a certain amount of greenhouse gas production, making it a more ‘clean’ source of energy.

Since Stirling engines have been around for over 200 years the ways of making them and improving the efficiency has taken many turns. In the early stages of the engine the ability to create highly efficient engines became limited due to technology and materials available. All the sources that I sampled agreed on what a Stirling engine was and what characteristics made them different. A Stirling engine is a heat engine that has the heating and cooling of gas that presses on the pistons moving both the gases and the pistons creating energy (American Stirling Company, n.d). Other articles on Stirling engines agree saying that Stirling engines are a machine that operates in a closed regenerative thermodynamic cycle. The use of Stirling engines is based off the Stirling engine cycle of power (Asnaghi, Ladjevardi, Izadkhast, Kashani, 2012). And then later heat activated cycle engine. Many large companies attempted to use Stirling engines for its advantages (Schimmoller, 2001). Again, another respected article states that the Stirling engine is based on the materials, development, and design of the engine to determine how well it works (Tarawneh, Al-Ghathian, Nawafleh, Al-Kloub, 2010). Then explaining how the Stirling engine works applying an external heat source to a closed cylinder where the cyclical expansion and compression of air inside the cylinder drives the pistons up and down (Helman, 2015) and because the engine is a closed system the expansion