Hi,
Bernhard Schaeffer now has a breakthrough in his
mixed steam water-benzol "Sterling" type motor.
It is way over Carnot efficiency and they have built a 30 KW
Motor/Generator combination which will go on sale in 2013.
Here is their latest announcement
from:
http://www.lesa-maschinen.de/cms/index.php?page=aktuell&hl=en_EN
DECEMBER 2008: GREAT MOOD AT LESA!
The breakthrough has succeeded -- efficiency is clearly higher than Carnot.
On Friday, 12/19/2008 at 10:10 pm, the LESA power plant was successfully started up using mixed steam. The parameters calculated show that 60% of electrical effectiveness can be reached in the future. Share our happiness. With this milestone, LESA enters the New Year stronger and wishes all shareholders and interested parties Happy Holidays. Additional information will be available in the next issue of LESA aktuell.
Here is their efficiency calculation that is now
verified by actual machines they have built !
http://www.overunity.com/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=get244
Hmm, that's certainly fascinating. If they have actually breached carnot, it's not only a great engineering feat, but also a scientific one.
"As the vapor expands, it releases more energy than is needed for recompression."
This however, doesn't quite make sense to me. Logically I would assume they still use some manner of cooling to get rid of that 40% waste. I didn't read the paper yet though, it might be explained there more thoroughly.
Their obvious next product should be a fuel-saver attachment to heat the boiler. This would consist of an ordinary Carnot-limited heat pump to draw heat from the surroundings and deposit it in the boiler, powered by the LESA motor. This would allow running the system on ambient heat, cooling its surroundings.
Any better-than-Carnot cycle should support this trick, equivalent to a Maxwell's demon. It would be environmentally correct, since overall energy remains conserved. The mechanical work eventually winds up as heat somewhere.
I am sure someone will claim that "Carnot is not dead, he's just pinin' for the fjords!" ;)
Quote from: retroworm on February 16, 2009, 06:57:19 AM
Hmm, that's certainly fascinating. If they have actually breached carnot, it's not only a great engineering feat, but also a scientific one.
"As the vapor expands, it releases more energy than is needed for recompression."
This however, doesn't quite make sense to me. Logically I would assume they still use some manner of cooling to get rid of that 40% waste. I didn't read the paper yet though, it might be explained there more thoroughly.
It is all really complicated to understand.
You must be really a thermodynamic "wiz" to understand this all.
As they are using a dual steam mixture of Benzol and water this combination
is also hard to find in the literature.
Only inventor Doczekal and Iriniy have worked on it in earlier times and
Bernhard Schaeffer worked from their data to build now their new 30 KWatts power plant.
It will be mainly heated by burning wood or other bio fuels like fast growing biomass.
I am going to visit them, when they will have their new demo in a few weeks and will
make a video.
P.S:The problem with coupling a heat pump to it and making a selfrunning
system is probably not so easy, as they are working with working temperatures
of 100 to 180 degrees Celsius and at this temperature range heatpumps are not efficient anymore.
You would have to transfer environmental heat from 10 to 15 degrees Celsius to about 180 degrees
Celsius and then you don´t get anymore a COP=3 for a heat pump as usual.....when I have understood
this right.
Regards, Stefan.
The 180C boiler temperature would probably rule out a conventional liquid-refrigerant heat pump. A Stirling cycle could be used. (A Stirling engine turned backwards will act as a heat pump, and can be made to nearly reach the Carnot limit. A common working fluid is helium gas under high pressure.)
The heat-pump COP would be low due to the Carnot limit. This could be helped by drawing from a source of low-grade heat that would otherwise be wasted, such as the boiler-furnace flue gas. The Schaeffer cycle itself could provide some of the heat, their diagram shows the first-stage water-separation tank running at 100C. It probably needs to dump some heat into a "cold pole," but not as much as a Carnot-limited cycle. Such heat could be fully-recovered by the heat pump as long as the Schaeffer cycle exceeded the Carnot limit by enough to cover losses.