Magnetic Air Engine

3D Printers

#engine #magnetic #3dprinting

[stevepittman]

Tom Stanton has been doing a ton of work on refining this kind of air-powered engine design over on his channel, you guys should collaborate! Tomatoes are disgusting!

[vyvyyvvohvgu]

It's Interesting how I never thought of that but it kinda makes sense if you think about it. It would be interesting to see this design taken further and being used on a vehicle (small car, maybe even RC :-)

[blakeazar]

Just put dry ice in the bottle and it will constantly keep the pressure up. You could add a safety mechanism to release the pressure if it gets too high.

[mahamasamataman]

Some thoughts for improvements...

1. Reduce the volume of air after the "ignition valve" (the one providing air to the cylinder). As it currently is, the pressure shoots up when the valve is open - compressing the entire volume not just the cylinder. It seemed like it was a sort of loopy hose. If the volume there is high enough, it won't be able to fully depressurize when the piston is at bottom and the exhaust ports are open. If it doesn't fully depressurize, then the piston will have to fight the remaining pressure in order to get back to the top of the cylinder.

2. Rather than use a second valve, consider just using a pressure regulator between your high pressure source and the bottle. The bottle can be a smaller one; but the opening should be fairly open -- otherwise you could just use a CO2 canister that you previously emptied. By using a pressure regulator, you won't need a controller. You could then have a source bank of a few of the CO2 canisters, the regulator, a small bottle, the ignition valve and then the piston... it should fit in a model ship if you wanted to do some gear reduction to a paddle wheel or something like that...

3. Lastly, because you are starting with compressed air, there could be a different way to go about it. Consider a wheel with multiple scoops out of its outer edge. These scoops should be something more like a J profile so that one side was very sloped and the other very "catchy". For the simplest design the outer case would have air input ports and air output ports spaced around. The length of the scoops should be such that no two adjacent ports would be open at the same time. You should consider a different number of scoops (say perhaps six) verses sets of input/output ports (perhaps five) -- so that there should always be an input port open to one of the scoops at all times... thus self starting. The wheel itself would be the flywheel... so you could space some nuts around it for mass. You could use magnets if you wanted to in order to use the controller to adjust the pressure to get a desired speed. The first version could just leave the air pressure on all of the time. If you wanted to get more efficient, you could have an "ignition valve" for each input port. Use a single magnet in the flywheel to make the timing right for all of the input ports.

Just some ideas, lots of luck...

[chronicleheavy]

Its always great seeing his face lightup as his machines start to work

[jonathanshul]

You should probably make a collab with Tom Stanton because he made a similar air engine that he has been perfecting.

[Levibetz]

I suggested this to Tom as well but I think you could get a big jump in efficiency by implementing a helmholtz resonator around the exhaust ports such that after the pressure spike it cycles to a low pressure for the next cycle's exhaust phase. If you can get down to atmospheric or lower pressure in the cylinder on the up stroke it'd take a lot of waste out of the engine.

[OliPost]

Use a 1-litre scuba tank and a first-stage pressure reducer. Then you have 200 litres in 200 bars reduced to 8 bars. These tanks are common in the diving community as "argon" tanks for dry suits ( but everybody just uses them with cheaper air). Just fill at any dive shop for under a euro. Any other size tank (0, 1 to 15 litres) is usable too.

[neoboost]

To utilize the full potential of the electrical valve you should, instead of the magnet switch use a sliding contact on the flywheel (like a contact breaker in an old engine), this would allow you to not just open the valve at exactly top dead center, giving you more power and better efficiency, but also give you the ability to tune the engine for power/ run duration by varying the length of the metal strip:
Top dead center to ~90 degress of rotation for longer running time |
Top dead center to exposure point of the outlets for maximal power
Edit: Alternatively you could use a cam & microswitch, instead of a sliding contact, this would be easier to set up, but you'd have to deal with imbalence of the flywheel caused by adding the cam.

[winterloggan]

If you want to increase max RPM, consider using two solenoid valves in parallel. That way you can alternate between the two, theoretically doubling the rate which you can supply air to the engine.

[davecleavenger]

Improvement Idea: I wonder if you could retrofit a rim/tire to provide both the air reservoir and means of locomotion. If you do the BB8 thing, where an off-center weight is the actual transfer of motion, use your air engine to move the weight forward a bit and let gravity do the work of moving the tire along. If you use your timing circuit to detect top dead center, you could add another signal that detected if the weight is bottom dead center, then AND the two signals together to fire the engine. Or something.

[Roukos_Rks]

you can add a pressure regulator to the tank so that the perfomance of the engine stays constant throughout most of the tank pressures

[bonzairob]

If you put the magnet on the crank wheel, you could adjust the engine timing by moving the hall effect sensor around it - that way you could pre-fire the solenoid valve and get it to go faster :)

[labtorie]

I think you can place the magnet on the flywheel and manually adjust the position of the sensor. Thus you’ll be able to find the most efficient angle of valve opening. Some sort of variable valve timing :)

[yobosses]

Since you already have the arduino controlling the bottle pressure, add a magnetic encoder and control the angle to open and close the valve to improve efficiency. You could also measure rpm with this!

[alden]

I just had an amazing idea, and I HAD to come back and share it. What if you put a thick, strong rubber balloon, one that takes at least 1 bar of pressure to inflate beyond its empty state, inside the pressure vessel (the bottle, in this instance), such that when you pressurize the bottle, you're inflating that balloon inside the bottle? It wouldn't affect the maximum amount of pressure the bottle can hold, as the balloon would just mold to the shape of the bottle, but when the bottle is close to empty, the balloon will continue to squeeze out air until it's completely "relaxed." I'm pretty sure it would act too keep the air under pressure until the very lay moment, while also helping to keep the pressure constant until it reaches that point! You could also just wrap thick rubber bands around the bottle, which would achieve the same effect while also strengthening the bottle, but the balloon method woukd achieve the same effect, but in a simpler way.

[LexLoTUStheGawd]

As a car guy who loves your videos, it would be very cool to see this design implemented in an inline, multicylinder engine! Much love Integza!

[taylanbbb]

I would recommend using an air regulator between the bottle and the air engine. I think it will reduce the oscillations in pressure. Also use it with your CO2 recharging system because that was genius. Happy building!

[sveazoe]

9:54 "That's pretty cool". A truly great pun.

[eykan_ow]

The resemblance to Tom Stanton's video about this type of engine is insane, even the same sponsor! x)