RE: 201613 Nov 2020 21:13
crh: From your previous messages, you seem to slightly misunderstand the Inspirit ‘tech’. The Charger doesn’t use waste heat recovery, forget those words and that notion. They burn 20 kW of gas to produce electricity and the waste product is hot water. You previous words on efficiency seem at odds with this concept. This was the plan from day one back in the 80s. What you call Inspirits waste heat recovery ‘tech’ could be represented by the heat exchanger designed to work with the boiler to apply the heat to the Stirling engine. Now the big question, is the heat exchanger intrinsic to the boiler, if it is then you can’t throw away the boiler because all that’s left is a Stirling engine without a heat source. I said in a previous message, interfaces are the tricky part, for each and every application you will have to design a new interface to apply the heat to the engine. I suspect you could throw away a lot of efficiency by not getting the heat into the engine correctly, the point of the patent, personally I think the boiler and H.E. are inseparable.
Another problem, their Stirling engine comes in only one capacity only, 3.2 or 6.4 kWe depending upon which way the wind blows, fairly small at that. If you are talking furnaces or turbines then I guess there is a lot of waste heat floating around and then you’ll need bigger capacity engines or lots of them!
Also its worth bearing in mind that the H.E. was designed by the original Norwegian team of, I think, 4 guys working for Disenco. Their names appear on the patents, I doubt Inspirit have changed the design and the patents will expire soon.
So a lot of design work, AKA expense, will be required to adapt to true waste heat recovery. There never has been waste heat recovery expertise in Inspirit unless JG and his wife have been taking night classes.