Sun Tracking Steam Turbine!

What the fuck is this, and why should you give a shit?

 This is a power-generating steam turbine that anyone can make with standard commodity parts, which I am developing to sell but also open sourcing so that other people can also copy and sell it.  Mine will be a particularly nice version for sale with a target price of $500 and an output of 500 kw, meaning it can make a substantial dent in the average house bill for all the time it can run. 

The applications can vary- I am somewhat envisioning these being installed at the peaks of roofs on homes and so on, since they are relatively small and unobtrusive and could generate substantial power without changing the look of a house substantially (unlike standard solar panels), but it could also be used to expand the power generating capacity of some other kind of solar array, and there are two additional important footnotes about function:

First, part of the intent is to allow these units to be chained together, producing far greater amounts of steam, with which they can run conventional coal-fire power plant steam turbines, with minimal investment, and only moderate changes to the plumbing and architecture of those buildings.

Second, the use of steam with these units is not confined to power generation.  For various applications, I could forsee steam being used to accelerate decomposition and breakdown of organic wastes (such as in biogas digesters, or other things such as biodeisel), being used to desalinate seawater for drinking without the conventional overhead of fuel costs, and there are almost certainly other obvious and easy applications to use this on that I have not yet thought of.

So, this project is based around a few fundamental assumptions and an approach based on them.

1. While superior in terms of the lack of moving parts, solar power from the photo-electric has a barrier of production; the average person can't produce silicon crystals in their garage, or from basic machined parts up in the mountains somewhere remotely.
   
2. While inferior in terms of longevity, moving parts can be reasonably well made by the average person if they have the right tools to do this with and the knowledge of how to set about this practically, and so a solar power solution that relies on some mechanical conversion of energy, while imperfect, is exponentially more implementable by normal people without heavy expensive and dangerous specialized equipment.

So, what is my idea? Below is an illustration to show, roughly, what I'm hoping the assembled first generation of DIY prototypes look like.  The left frame shows a boxy structure on top of a bucket, and on the right the boxy structure is pointed upwards at 45 degrees, revealing a cylinder inside.  There is no visual indication, but the front of these boxes hold a fresnel lens, which is a way of taking a big round lens and making it a lot of flat pieces of that same lens shape, but on a clear sheet, arranged in concentric circles.

 The cylinder, visible interior to the box structures on the right, is made of aluminum, with a coil of copper tubing through it.

The lens I've just described focuses sunlight onto this block of aluminum by turning left and right on the bucket, and moving the lens up and down.

On the front, you can see a small access door to let you reach the interior portion: Inside, there is a turbine, a pump, 2 motors, a computer, a controller to interface between the computer's lower voltage and the motor's higher voltage, and a transformer to turn the electricity this generates into the electricity coming out of your wall's outlets- and in fact, that's the normal way to put it in, so when you run this, you plug it into your house's wall, and it supplies the power on the electrical grid- it literally spins your meter backwards.

Does the turbine sound complex? It's about as complex as a metal hockey puck. Here is a picture to illustrate one of my early thoughts on it:

Now, this is not much like what the final design will be, but there are three important elements here.  First, center, is a disc with small holes around the rim; that is the 'hockey puck' I mentioned. Second, the box below it; this is a box to hold steam pressure in.  The box is important because it equalizes steam pressure across the holes on the actual outside of the turbine body, so that instead of being pushed unevenly from one side, the hockey puck is pushed with balance from all sides.  The box is also important because it allows steam from multiple sources to all power the turbine. 

The third important part is the square with a circle with a star shape in it- a doodle of the coil arrangements to be held in place on a jig that set them in place in plastic that forms a gasket, sealing the turbine with the magnets as close as possible to the coils in that gasket, but with sufficient thickness that a misfire of the turbine won't cause a critical malfunction and shutdown. The intention is for the venting of the steam into the turbine chamber to create a boundary layer between the turbine body and the actual rotor itself.

All of which sounds complicated, but bear in mind, the parts list for this is shit from home depot, walmart, or amazon.  Sand and kitty litter form a casting sand that allow you to cast sophisticated metal parts; there is already a venerable series of books, called "The Gingery Home Workshop", that document how to take this fact and turn it into a full set of functioning machine tools, without using any to make them. Since things have come along a bit since then, I'm not quite sure what form this will take, but it will involve a combination of conventional machine tools and interchangeable CNC components running on various Raspberry Pi configurations.

My intention is to use this sort of technology, as distilled as possible, as a practical basis for the desperate to have a shot at something without needing help.  Remember, I'm the fucking ex-missionary here, my introduction to this problem was with 1) my conservative Christian upbringing's fundamental set of assumptions about being an oppressed minority actively assaulted in literal culture wars (hey! look! Trump got elected! That's the first time I've seen an election everyone fucking lost!), and 2) my demographic of people I was trying to help with this stuff was the tribal groups in Burma who weren't being allowed into Thailand as refugees (probably something to do with how many crossed the border illegally, and the meth trade, and the nature of racism in Thai culture), where the constraints were 1) lack of metal tools, electricity, education, and basically most levels of industrialization, 2) assholes, frequently heavily drugged up assholes on meth and heroine because they're trying to dull the sensation of having been child soldiers, are trying to kill you all the time, and 3) all the normal daily hazards of literally living in the fucking jungle.

Essentially, I want to make a "civilization in a box", a costco 10-gallon tote size box that contains everything you need to rebuild human culture after a nuclear apocalypse or asteroid impact, or that could let you grow all the food you'd need or want to eat on mars, and allow you to produce the stuff to create your electricity, treat your waste, collect and treat your water and grow your food.

So, this is a pretty good start, I think. it's mostly a flat-pack, all of the software and hardware is open source.

To round this out, here are a handful of other pictures of the various components I've been making and testing for use on this project.

 This is the copper coil I described in the block of aluminum earlier.  Remember, this is an open source component made from, in this case, quarter inch copper refrigeration coil tubing.

 This is the fresnel lens to collect the sunlight, using a section of pegboard for a frame to  mount it on, and two peieces of threaded rod to literally bolt it all together.

 This is an early pre-wired controller.  The current version looks somewhat different, not least for being smaller, and the final version will not use that specific battery (which is literally junk I found on a street corner)

Finally, here is one of the earliest specific sketches of this thing. It's a very different sort of assembly, but you can see a crudely drawn fresnel lens, center, a boundary turbine with the short stack of disks above a cylinder below that, a copper tubing-in-aluminum block heat collector to its' left between it and the coils, and various other small pieces I envisioned assembling into something like what looks like the spot light at the top right, except of course the intent isn't to be a spot lighter, so much as a light spotter.