19 ms·
5 Megawatt Nitinol Engine by Mcdonnell Douglas (2015) [video]
- Animats 4y agoWonder whatever happened to that. And how they got nitinol to work so well. I've seen nitinol wire, but it's not very efficient. You usually only get a few percent of the heat energy out as mechanical energy.
- sacrosancty 4y agoConsidering they only talked about applications using low grade heat, I'd say it makes sense iff it's cheap enough, no matter how inefficient because that heat is normally wasted.
- b112 4y agoSo you say! Meanwhile, nitinol actually works via a quantum property, and is sucking energy out of a sister universe. You don't care because cheap and free, but they do! Doubly so because it sucks power at the easiest parallel source, which are (in their universe) simple copper wire. Worse, the power stolen is 1000x of times that received, meaning they have been having significant power losses on long power runs. This means that they have to setup more local generating power, as long power transfer from hydro dams, and clean central sources won't work. More coal, natural gas, thanks to you! And global warming is far more advanced there. But you don't care, eh? When will people learn.
- fire 4y agoI remember that episode of Stargate Atlantis
- komadori 4y agoThe Gods Themselves (1972) by Issac Asimov was perhaps the original inspiration. Funny story, the setting of part 2 was so different to part 1 that I mistook the book for a collection of novellas until more than half way through.
- tarsinge 4y agoThanks for the reference. For me it was not Stargate but a recent popular Sci-fi book.
- imtringued 4y agoIt's called the W dimension.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoOnly if you ignore costs.
- elihu 4y agoEfficiency was what I was wondering. But maybe a few percent efficiency is about the best we can do with relatively small temperature differences? I think radio isotope thermal generators are usually only a few percent efficient. It'd be interesting to try to propel a ship with the temperature differential between air and water.
- formerly_proven 4y agoRTGs have other issues as well, they need to radiate all heat on the "cold" side into space, so you're between a rock (high hot-cold temperature difference needed) and a hard place (need high cold temperature to radiate) even before you get to thermo-electric generators being inefficient.
- genewitch 4y agoiirc the stuff on probes is ~90W of TEM. I know a lot of people say "it's hard to cool stuff in space" but blackbody radiation is a thing. It's all just photons, in the end. the TEM just takes the high energy particles and slows them down enough to be "light" and takes a bit (10%?) of the energy from doing that and uses it to charge batteries. Kind of.
- IshKebab 4y agoQuite an expensive machine to only generate 35W. Consider how much cheaper and more reliable 35W of solar would be (even including an overnight battery).
- user_7832 4y agoComparing a 35W prototype from the 1900s with a modern 35W PV panel isn't very fair though.
- jeffybefffy519 4y agoSo what happened?
- TimSchumann 4y agoPhysics and Economics. A dastardly duo of conspirators.
- fellowniusmonk 4y agoOh man, was this the origin story of the rumor that an engine that ran on water was created by and then suppressed by the major car companies? Amazing, seeing this I feel like I've found bigfoot.
- jiggawatts 4y agoYou've got to wonder why it never went anywhere. Economics is probably the answer, but it doesn't seem satisfying. If it can extract useful work from merely warm water, it would seem like the ideal thing to maximise the overall thermal efficiency of a large power plant.
- tedunangst 4y agoWhy bother with a big mechanical contraption like this when you can simply stick the leads of a thermocouple in two cups of water?
- VBprogrammer 4y agoDoing so efficiently is the challenge. Thermoelectric generators have very low efficiency of 5-8%. They don't extract a meaningful amount of extra energy.
- beambot 4y agoSeebeck generation is indeed inefficient.... But for low temperature deltas, Carnot efficiency already implies pretty low theoretical efficiency limits.
- mannykannot 4y agoTrue, but this means that the ROI for any method of recovering energy from any process' waste heat plunges as the temperature differential drops.
- spqr0a1 4y agoThe largest unit demonstrated in this video output 35 watts. Not quite 5 megawatts, lest anyone get the wrong idea. That's mentioned in the paper linked in the description. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.48057 https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.48057
- ptsneves 4y agoIt is paywalled, definitely curious :(
- SemanticStrengh 4y agohttps://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.2514/3.48057 https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.2514/3.48057 > It is found that the Nitinol heat engine capital costs per unit power generating capacity are approximately $0.15/W, and that the cost of produced energy for the Nitinol heat engine portion of the power plant is approximately 0.74C/kWh, including operation, maintenance, Nitinol replacements and the cost of capital for the heat engine. It is concluded that Nitinol power plants for the conversion of low grade thermal energy may have a significant economical advantage over conventionally fueled power plants. It seems like it has a huge potential in nuclear plants
- Infernal 4y agoWhat is .74C? $.0074?
- downrightmike 4y agoPage 7, states $0.74
- rcxdude 4y agoThat paper was analysing the system with a temperature difference of 40C (a temperature difference which doesn't allow you to extract energy efficiently anyway). Nuclear power plants at minimum produce steam at about 300C (all the way up to 900C). It doesn't seem like it the paper would particularly support its use for nuclear power. (Basically all plausible uses for this involve using low-grade power. But any system which attempts to do this needs to be really, really cheap compared to conventional systems to be worthwhile).
- ChuckMcM 4y agoSo back in the 90's a friend and regular attendee at the HBRC club meetings had started a company promoting nitonal wire which they had called "Muscle Wire"[1] they apparently still have a web site. I have a couple of their educational packs and have built their hot/cold water engine which uses a coffee cup with hot water and a coffee cup with cold water to run. It really is quite fun and I ended up building a simple actuator with one of the kits. These days it would be fun to put a cell phone camera on an "antenna stalk" that could be turned and pointed using this stuff. For most of their applications a current was applied to the wire that would heat it up and cause it to spring out straight, then as it cooled the wire would recover. Not particularly fast actuation but quite controllable. [1] https://musclewires-com.3dcartstores.com/Muscle-Wires%C2%AE-Technology_ep_44.html https://musclewires-com.3dcartstores.com/Muscle-Wires%C2%AE-...
- herewulf 4y agoCoincidentally I'm familiar with a company called Dynalloy[1] that appears to have commercialized the same thing on a significant scale with the main application of simplifying mechanisms. Their website says that Muscle Wires and Flexinol are their registered trademarks so there must be a connection? [1]: https://dynalloy.com/index.php https://dynalloy.com/index.php
- lgats 4y agohttps://uspto.report/Search/muscle%20wires https://uspto.report/Search/muscle%20wires i suspect Dynalloy nabbed up the trademark in 2004 after the original owner of muscle wire (1992) failed to keep up the fillings in 2003.
- zafka 4y agoI worked at a company in the late 90's that made some of (or first) Braille computers. The braille dots were actuated with Piezo driven at over 200 volts. The piezo compound was proprietary and supposedly the blending process was done by two or three old women in Germany. Anyhow, we had a retired French physicist (French civilian nuclear program) working on driving braille cells with Nitinol under a SBIR grant. Unfortunately we were not able to get past prototype stage. The was a very interesting place to work. Almost forgot the lead- I still have a package of "Muscle wire" that he gave me.
- nwiswell 4y agoSo superelastic nitinol could be used to fashion a heat pump by placing a wire around a small pulley in the cold reservoir and a large pulley in the hot reservoir. When the wire is strongly deformed, the phase transition causes it to absorb heat from its surroundings; as a result the area around the small pulley becomes colder. When this strain is released, the phase transformation is reversed and it will release heat to its environment. As a result, the cold reservoir gets colder and the hot reservoir gets hotter. I still wonder why I've never seen even a demonstration prototype of this effect.
- jeffrallen 4y agoIt works with rubber bands too: https://youtu.be/lfmrvxB154w https://youtu.be/lfmrvxB154w
- JKCalhoun 4y agoAlso: https://youtu.be/dBXL93984cQ?t=144 https://youtu.be/dBXL93984cQ?t=144
- khebbie 4y agoReninds me a bit of the stirling engine. It also operates on heat differences. And it has also not been used as much as one would have thought possible.
- tasty_freeze 4y agoDid anyone else get the impression the newsman was an American faking a continental accent?
- captainmuon 4y agoActually he was an American faking a Mid-Atlantic accent (which everybody faked, because it was a made up accent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
- nhinck2 4y agoActually it's an Australian accent.
- infradig 4y agoMid-Pacific I'd call it.
- nhinck2 4y agoIt's the cultivated Australian accent. It's relatively uncommon and is barely spoken by anyone under the age of 50.
- uf00lme 4y agoDefinitely looks and sounds like a 60/70s ABC (Australian Broadcasting corporation) science segment. Wonder if they still have something similar
- daniel-cussen 4y agoOh like the cultivated non-vulgar Chilean accent, mild version of the accent. Dying breed.
- infradig 4y agohttps://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Kevin_Sanders https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Kevin_Sanders "Sanders' CNN reports on Nitinol, a new metal energy conversion system won the US Engineer's Award for Broadcasting Excellence. His follow-up articles in Science Digest were translated in German and republished in Japanese by Japan Times in their annual selection of the world's best science reports. Sanders is working on a follow-up article and an update documentary for world release on new and startling disclosures on the origins and potential of Nitinol. )...
- jeffrallen 4y agoI believe this was also covered in the British educational programme named "Look Around You" (https://youtu.be/FBaVwwuErmU https://youtu.be/FBaVwwuErmU). /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DFHippie 4y ago> The calcic paste is heated in giant ovens to 12,000 BC and left to cool. This is some great science education!
- jeffrallen 4y agoBC was what they used Before Celsius.
- UberFly 4y ago"In hot water it springs back with forces of 55 TONS a square inch"... Hmmm. Is this possible?
- HPsquared 4y agoTo express that quantity in more familiar units, That's 758 MPa From Wikipedia article on Nickel-Titanium: "A great deal of pressure can be produced by preventing the reversion of deformed martensite to austenite—from 35,000 psi (240 MPa) to, in many cases, more than 100,000 psi (690 MPa). One of the reasons that nitinol works so hard to return to its original shape is that it is not just an ordinary metal alloy, but what is known as an intermetallic compound." So yeah, there or thereabouts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium#Mechanism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium#Mechanism
- blacksqr 4y agoPerhaps there is a niche application for it in the field of gas compression.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoConsider that water itself can exert similarly tremendous pressures with phase changes.
- aaron695 4y ago
- jakedata 4y agoFor a statewide school science competition in 1988, I obtained some sample nitinol springs and attempted to build a rotating engine powered by heat differentials. Unfortunately the ones they sent me were very short so I had to make a reciprocating engine instead. I remember being very disappointed at the time, but seeing the prototypes McDonell Douglas made around then leads me to believe I was on the right track.
- gleglegle 4y agoGood visual overview of nitinol properties here (Action Lab): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65r6Ztxi0EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65r6Ztxi0EQ
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoFrom a comment > Buehler was looking at alloys with two solid states as possible materials for the nose cone. He had selected roughly 60 alloys for further examination from a book entitled Constitution of Binary Alloys–nitinol being one of them. When he made the ingots for testing, he intentionally dropped one of the cold ones on the floor. Hoping to hear a clear bell-like ring, indicating that the metal had the properties he was hoping for. Instead, it returned a dull thud–similar to dropping a sack of flour on the ground. Worried that the ingot was filled with internal flaws, he dropped one of the ingots that hadn’t cooled yet. This returned a wonderful bell-like ring. However, after the ingot had been cooled in water, it returned a dull, leaden thud, just like the first one. This is the first indication that nitinol had a substantially different double state. Buehler named his alloy nitinol for Nickel-Titanium Naval Ordinance Laboratories. All of this occurred in 1959. However, the shape memory aspect of nitinol wasn’t discovered until a lab meeting in 1961. Buehler had been performing tests to determine the fatigue life of nitinol by bending a strip into an accordion like shape over and over again. His project was brought under review and his technician was demonstrating the fatigue properties to senior officials. During this presentation, one of the officials present heated the nitinol with a lighter, at which point it rapidly straightened out. This, of course, sent ripples throughout the scientific community. This material could take low grade heat and generate mechanical energy! Numerous scientists began experimenting with how to build engines with nitinol that would take low grade energy and transform it into very high grade energy that could be used to do work. This culminated in the Nitinol Heat Engine Conference, hosted by the Naval Surface Weapons Center (previously Naval Ordinance Labs) in 1974. At the Nitinol Heat Engine Conference, the NSWC gathered together the top scientists who had been working on nitinol to discuss what had been done and what still needed to be done to make nitinol heat engines a reality. The presentations from this conference are available in the book Proceedings of the Nitinol Heat Engine Conference. At this point, the activity surrounding nitinol seemed to all but dry up and disappear. Prior to the conference, nitinol researchers were featured on news channels like CNN and BBC. Afterwards, there was little to no attention given to nitinol by major television networks for over twenty years. This led to all kinds of conspiracy theories ranging from nitinol being kept for top secret government experiments to nitinol being an alien technology that was discovered in the Roswell accident. However, the reality is very different. Behind the scenes, material scientists were working hard to figure out HOW nitinol worked. > In order to fully optimize a nitinol heat engine, it must be understood what happens when nitinol undergoes the shape memory effect. This will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 2. The next time nitinol appeared in public, it wasn’t referred to as nitinol, it was called just plain titanium. Of course, this is a misnomer since nitinol is slightly more nickel than titanium. This new public appearance didn’t even exhibit the shape memory effect as people were so excited about earlier. No, this was completely different and it was marketed under the trade name FlexonÒby the company Marchon Eyewear. Released for public sale in 1995, Flexonâwas unusual in that you could bend it through incredible distortions and it would just snap back to its original shape once you released it. Once Nike began to use it in their Vision line of glasses, athletes everywhere began buying it up. Gone were the days of breaking your glasses on a regular basis just because you lived an active lifestyle. You could sit on them, you could intentionally bend them, you could tackle someone in football, and they would just bounce back. These glasses would forgive those bumps and bangs over and over again–seemingly forever. People who broke their glasses every six months now could go several years on a single frame. The frames were termed ‘superelastic’. Once superelastic nitinol was discovered, it wasn’t long before surgeons began using it as they worked on people. Vascular stents was one of the first applications because the stent could be folded so flat that it could be inserted through the tiniest of holes into the patient’s bloodstream–minimizing recovery time. Once in place, the superelastic nitinol wire could withstand severe deformation and outlast stainless steel by an order of magnitude. To put this in perspective, superelastic nitinol stents were capable of undergoing a 30% deformation with a cycles to failure life expectancy greater than 10,000,000. Stainless steel, on the other hand, could withstand a deformation of just 0.5% with fatigue life of around 1 million cycles.
- pohl 4y agoFrom the comments: Note that no 5 MW engine was demonstrated in this video. It's just a figure that engineer guesstimated as a plausible combined power output of multiple stacked engines. Quote at 3:05.
- mhb 4y agoCompany founded to exploit applications of Nitinol: http://www.tinialloy.com/ http://www.tinialloy.com/ Buy some wire of your own: http://www.tinialloy.com/livewire.html http://www.tinialloy.com/livewire.html (I worked there quite a while ago)
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago> Clot retrievers and aneurysm closures for treatment of intracranial disease, and components for implantable drug delivery systems, are targeted areas of TiNi Alloy Company technology. Any news on this?
- mhb 4y agoI don't know - it's been decades. But the history of TiNi alloy is littered with ideas which seem like they could, potentially, take advantage of its unique properties but don't ultimately pan out due to cost, difficulty of fastening the material, need for a compliant element since the alloy only works in one direction. An interesting successful application was the Frangibolt - a non-explosive way of breaking bolts to separate components of an assembly in space.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoA friend who is a material scientist told me about another interesting TiNi application. I don't recall the precise details, but some sort of medical "device" that only assumes its final configuration once inside the body. You can tune the temperature response of the alloy, and so this was made "small enough" to fit (maybe through blood vessels?) and after a short time would "expand" to its intended shape. Wish I could remember more.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agolooks like a very promising field
- mikewarot 4y ago
- marcodiego 4y agoGreat! Now, why don't we have nitinol engines everywhere?
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago"no one knows why it happens" What is the state of the art knowledge on this in 2022?
- TimSchumann 4y agoI'm not even positive that was the 'state of the art knowledge' on this even then. I think it was just the news doing news things. I highly doubt the chemists and physicists who built that precision engine would have been able to do it without a fairly decent understanding of what was actually going on at the materials level, at least something better than 'nobody knows!'.
- NullPrefix 4y agoI would just like to point out that there's a difference between knowing what something does and knowing why it does what it does.
- genewitch 4y agothere are a lot of unanswered (or poorly, or incorrectly) answered questions in materials science specifically, but science in general. For a recent example, Mould and Medhi recently had a youtube battle about how and why the Mould Effect happens - that is, if you have a string or chain with beads evenly distributed and fairly close together in a container, and start one end "spilling out" of the container, the part of the chain that is changing direction (from up to down) raises above the rim of the container. I can't remember the youtuber offhand, but there was another question about the "speed of electrons" in a long wire, with actual experimentation to determine the speed. It gets dangerously close to faster than light communication for my tastes so i don't really remember the thesis and arguments offhand, my brain just gets warm.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agogoing faster than light is sometimes a possibility! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation It is not possible to go faster than light only in an absolute vacuum medium.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoare there relationships between the academic knowledge on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thixotropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thixotropy and Nitinol property?
- dghughes 4y agoNitinol is just an alloy of nickel-titanium 50/50 or slighty differnet ratio. I thought it was more exotic more elements in it but it's quite a simple alloy.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoHad they got the guy from Flextape, everything would've run on nitinol nowadays
- SemanticStrengh 4y agothis seems remarkably efficient https://youtu.be/3MfTJVAtx6w?t=255 https://youtu.be/3MfTJVAtx6w?t=255
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoclaimed 70Watts here https://youtu.be/3MfTJVAtx6w?t=357 https://youtu.be/3MfTJVAtx6w?t=357
- jiveturkey 4y ago1982, not 2015