Solar powered Steam engine

Steam engine brought industrial revolution in 19th century. Moreover, we can say that they were the engine of growth. At present time too, they are widely used in nuclear and coal power plants.

We discussed steam engine briefly in our post steam engine powered bicycle. Today we will discuss how we can produce steam using solar power?

Why do we need to use solar power?

Traditional steam engines mainly use coal and nuclear fuel to power themselves. Each of these methods has their repercussion. Coal powered engine damage our environment and after Japan Tsunami we know that use of nuclear fuel can be dangerous. Moreover, there are other strong reasons too, one of the most important is that sun light is free and abundant while coal and uranium are not.

How this project works?

To understand it, first you should know about how steam engine works?

Steam engines produce steam by boiling water and later use that steam for pushing piston in to and fro motion.My idea is, if we can use energy from the sun, to boil our water and left remaining steam engine intact, it would work exactly like our traditional engine except that our engine is powered by green energy.

To boil water using solar energy, we need a large magnify glass focused on our Solar Evacuated tube.
Evacuated tubes absorb solar energy and convert it into heat for use in water heating.  There are several types of evacuated tubes used in solar thermal collectors.This type of tube is chosen for its reliability, performance and cost effectiveness. We connect this tube with our engine using pipe and pass steam through it.


When lens of a system receives sun light, it direct it to the focal point which is our evacuated tubes.This process starts to heat these tubes.When we pass water through them,it converts into steam which we later use to power our engine.

Required Material:

Fresnel Lens
Solar Evacuated tube: Evacuated tubes absorb solar energy and convert it into heat for use in water boiling.

Useful Links:

Engine Plans

How to build one?

Toy Steam engine video:

Does it really works?



Related PDF :

Power generation using steam turbine

Soccer Playing mini Robots

Football doesn’t needs any introduction, it is one of the most famous sport every played on earth. This game had taken giant leap when played by robot. I have seen that in any robotic engineering competition, game of robots football is inevitable.

 Robot Football requires smart movable robots that need to act as a team in real time and adjust in a very dynamic environment to accomplish definite objectives.It is very complex topic, but I would try to share basics of this project with you.


Concepts:

Artificial Intelligence: While playing football robot would face new challenges, you should have knowledge of AI to program it in such a way that it can take its own decisions according to the situation.

Real time image processing: It is self explanatory, that why we need that.

Autonomous systems: It’s up to you which type of robot you want to build, fully autonomous or computer controlled one.

Mechatronics : It is a science involved with both Mechanical and Electronics. Without having knowledge of both you would not able to move forward with this project.
Required Material:

Lego MINDSTORMS NXT Series

It is extremely helpful in removing complexities, because without it, you would face hardware constraints and lose focus from your primary goal.MINDSTORMS kit includes NXT Brick, Microprocessors with Bluetooth, Servo Motors, Light, Touch, Sound and Distance sensors.

 Required Programs:

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT: It is a drag and drop software and developing programs with this new software is fun and easy. It comes with building instructions and programming guides to easily begin constructing and programming with MINDSTORMS NXT robots.

Realterm: Realterm is a terminal program specially designed for capturing, controlling and debugging binary and other difficult data streams.

Useful Link: 
IIT Kanpur Micro Robot

Related Video:

 

Related Post:
Robotics Project

Fruit Picking Robots

Rough sketch of fruit picker robot using Microsoft Paint            

Have you seen large fruits garden with lots of fruits. For a fruit gardener, it is extremely important to harvest fruit in time. In a large garden there is need of many people to select which fruit is ripen enough to pick out and which doesn't?


It is time consuming process and if not done in time would cause wastage and money loss. This project idea is about fruit picking robot which not only work as a fruit picker but smart enough to pick only those fruits which are ripen enough.

Level: Difficult

Challenges:

Fruit picking is more complicated than it appears. It is extremely difficult for robot to pick correct fruit without causing any damage to the surrounding.It involves many concepts and technologies to complete this task effectively.

Robot should have following capabilities for fruit picking to work:

1.  Image Sensing
2.  Reach to every part of tree
3. Movable Platform
4. All data about surrounding
5. Box to put all fruits

How to build one?

Even though I have discussed most of the above concepts in this blog at separate posts but this project needs to use all of them at once.

Image Sensing:  Our Robot needs to sense the environment and takes decision accordingly. It is very important because without it we can’t find out exact location of fruit as well as whether it is ripped or not.

Reach to every part: To maximize reach of our robot, we would build many flexible arms on each side of it. Arms of our robot would be flexible enough they not only pick fruit from anywhere on the tree, but they would not cause any harm to surrounding objects. Technically we need more degree of freedom with our arm. Some Stanford students achieved it using Visibility Graph Search and Inverse Kinematics .Details of their project is available here. http://ai.stanford.edu/~mitul/btp.html
Related Post on this blog:
Robotic Arm with Gripper

Movable Platform: Platform of our machine should have capability to revolve 360 degree, without it we would not able to gather information about the surrounding. To build your platform, you would need Motor drivers, Navigation system, Motion planner, and Robot Controller

Box: It is a place where robot would put its fruit after picking them. It would be at the top of the machine.
 All data about surrounding: Data interpretation about the surrounding is important because without it we would not able to move forward in correct path. You would get details about path finding in following links:
Vehicle pathplanning in three dimensions using optics
Autonomous Pathfinding

Related Video :


Related Projects:
Robotics

Mechanical Sprayer

If you know about farming, pests cause more damages to crop in comparison to any other factor. One of the solutions for this problem is spraying pesticides. Pesticides have their advantages as well as disadvantages. Which type of pesticides is good for nature is altogether different topic and we would discuss about them later. All we know is spraying pesticides is one of the most pertinent things in farming.

I hope you have seen people spraying in the farms; they use electrical or fossil fuel sprayer to spray pesticides on the field. Today, we will talk about alternatives such as mechanical sprayer.

What is mechanical sprayer?

It is a machine which is used to spray pesticides on crops using concepts of hydraulics as shown in video.

Concept:

We discussed Pascal law in our post Hydraulic Car lift. We would use same concept here. Mechanical Sprayer consists of small cart, drum, pipe and sprayer itself. It works like a steam engine but in exactly opposite way. Here, when we move cart forward, wheels of cart revolves and push piston in downwards direction. This downward motion of piston push pressure on water and as a result it comes out from the sprayer.

Related Posts:

Wind Powered Drip Irrigation System
Bicycle Sprayer 

Wind Powered Drip Irrigation

Whenever, I visit any nearby farm land, one thing I notice mostly is its dependence on continuous water supply. Some areas have sufficient water but in most of the places, I found that they are heavily dependent on ground water and rain. Moreover, many people still use traditional methods of irrigation due to which large amount of water get wasted.


Agriculture has become very vital with continuous increase in world population. Population affects agriculture from both ends, firstly by creating shortage of land to create houses and industries for new generation and secondly by increasing food demand.

For shortage of water, drip irrigation is widely popular. But, it depends greatly on electricity. This electricity is either provided by government or produced by fossil fuel generators. In my opinion, both ways are costly and pollute our environment too.

What’s the solution?

When problem is of that large scale, it can’t be solved by one solution.Therefore I decided to write series of project ideas related to this topic in coming months. Today, my focus is on drip irrigation using wind power.
By analyzing all facts, I found that to increase production,we need to utilize every available resource and for that we need to shift our focus to the land which is bare because of water shortages.To use these lands, we need water. We should save water using drip irrigation at places where it is available at abundant and divert it into water scarce areas.

How we can do that?

• 1. Promoting drip irrigation to all the places irrespective of water shortage or not : In last 10 years, drip irrigation has become very popular and affordable too. Governments in many countries started to give subsidies to make it more attractive.
• 2. Using renewable sources of energy in agriculture: In my opinion, if we use renewable energy, like wind, to power our pump. It would make drip irrigation more popular in areas where electricity is not easily accessible and fossil fuels are too costly.

How?

Before, I tell you anything, you should know about how drip irrigation works?

These video would help you understand that:


My solution is very simple. I am suggesting you to just replace pump used in this system with windmill pump. These pumps use wind energy to pump water out. Read more at windmill pump project.

Related:

Mechanical Engineering Projects

Nitro Powered mini RC Car

We have discussed RC Cars before with electric engine and stirling engine. Today we are going to talk about Nitro Car, which has more similarities with cars we use in our daily life.

So, what is Nitro Car?

In my own simple definition, it is a car which runs on fuel consist of methane, nitro methane and oil.It has small internal combustion engine which gets it spark from glow plug powered by batteries inside a car. For more detailed info you can anytime refer to Wikipedia.

What is Glow Plug?

It is similar to spark plug, a helical wire filament usually made up of platinum, but mostly used in small cars. It gets its spark from batteries, compression heat and catalyst effect of methane and platinum.


What’s the difference?

It gets it power from fuel unlike electric cars which use batteries.It has speed and torque which other small cars find difficult to match.

Why should I build one?

It gives you first hand expertise in building a car which has strong resemblance to real world cars. Its combustion cycle is similar to petrol cars. It uses glow plug to ignite a fuel, parallel to spark plug in petrol engines.

Because of all above likeness, it would be great learning curve for all those interested in automobiles.

Problems:

• Some time engine gets overheated and can damage itself. We should keep our close eyes on engine temperature. 
• Tires wear down quickly, because of car speed and drift. Moreover, they are expensive too.

Engineering Branches:

Mechanical and Automobile

Things I need?


Related Video:



Related Projects:

Stirling Engine Mini RC Cars
Computer Controlled Car

Stirling Engine mini RC Car

We had discussed both Stirling Engine and Remote control cars in two separate posts.  In this post we will combine these two technologies. Before we start our discussion, I would briefly describe both of them.

Stirling Engine

1.Piston 2. Displacer, Hot gases in the left side of Heat displacer, push it forward to move piston. 

It is an external combustion engine where combustion occurs outside the engine itself. An advantage with this engine is that, it can be used with any type of heating source both renewable and non renewable. Basic form of engine consists of one cylinder, hot at one end and cold at the other, loose fitting displacer, power piston and flywheel.

When we heat at one end, gas starts to expand and push loose displacer forward, which is connected with piston which eventually revolves the flywheel. With its revolution it pushes back the fitting displacer to its original position having cold gas at both ends again. This cycle continues till the heat is supplied from heat source.

RC Cars

These cars are usually powered by electric batteries can be controlled by remote control. It consists of three components, transmitter (our remote), receiver (which receives transmitter signal) and car itself. Transmitter role is not only limited to receiving signals but it also transforms these radio waves into electric signals and controls the components. Most of these cars use Amplitude modulation but some newer once also use Frequency modulation. If you have never heard about modulation, our fm and am radio works with same transmitter, receiver concept. By the way, frequency most often used in mini remote cars is 2.4 GHz.

RC Cars itself is a big concept and out of scope for this post, for this project idea, I would rather recommend you to buy an RC car from toy store and install our engine on it. If it works, then you can shift your focus to build one car by yourself.