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- LONDON - Sound could be the key to engines of the future according to
American researchers.
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- A team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico has developed an environmentally friendly engine with no
moving parts that is powered by sound waves.
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- The new engine is made from steel tubing
and is cheap to produce. Called a thermoacoustic Stirling heat engine,
it consists of a long baseball-bat-shaped resonator with an oval chamber
instead of a handle.
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- The engine is filled with compressed
helium and when heat is applied to the "handle" acoustic energy
in the form of sound waves is produced. This can be used to drive a piston
and create electricity. The team is also working on a similar system to
cool refrigerators.
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- Scott Backhaus, one of the inventors
of the engine, says: "Conventional engines are limited by the laws
of thermodynamics and their complexity. Typically the most efficient engines
are the huge turbines used in power stations.
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- "Our small engine is actually 10
percent more efficient than the best turbine, largely because of its simplicity,"
he says. The engine is also maintenance-free as it has no moving parts.
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- The team is working on a way to use solar
energy to power the engine and considering a system that uses a car's exhaust
heat to power its air-conditioning system. A home version of the engine,
also under development, could be used both to generate electricity and
provide domestic heating.
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- The principle behind the engine was discovered
by Robert Stirling, a 19th-century Scottish inventor, who found that cooling
and heating gases could drive a piston.
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