(no subject)

[litch]

This is pretty cool:
http://www.microturbine.com/

They make refrigerator size multi-fuel turbine electric generators that could power a small building or a small complex of houses. They'll run on just about anything, LP, Natural Gas, Diesel, Kerosene, even Biogas. They're also set up to recover the heat generated from the turbine so you can use them as small boilers to provide hot water for your building.

Something like this would be way cool for a cohousing installation, especially if you could produce enough refuse to provide your own biogas.

Comments

Cool

[hillgiant.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to see these guys doing well. I remember including them in my tech writing paper at UT. I used one of their papers on an early prototype turbine as a reference. Specifically for use in hybrid-electric vehicles. Turbines offer the best horsepower specific and pound(fuel) specific emissions of any combustion process. Unfortunately, they do not make a good automotive application because (a) they are generally too big and (b) they only operate efficiently over a narrow rpm range, as Chrysler (iirc) discovered much to their chagrin in the early seventies. These guys have gotten the miniaturization working. You can solve the rpm range issue by connecting the turbine to a generator set and a pack of batteries. The batteries power a drive motor. Its like a regular electric car, except you are carrying around a little power plant for when the batteries get low.

Sadly, the production equipment is a little larger than the journal article predicted it would. The journal article predicted a size of ~6" OD and 18" long. Looking at the tech specs, I think they were just talking about the spindle, not all the housing, insulation, and other junk. Still, its small enough to be used in a bus (http://www.microturbine.com/Documents/C30hev.pdf). Taking a closer look, I think that is a US Electricar bus. Which would be cool, seeing as how I worked there for a summer. In fact, I would be working there now if one of the myriad of senior vice presidents had not driven the company into the ground with his manic drive to do more projects than we could actually get funds for.

[ce-luna.livejournal.com]

but how much does it cost??? stupid web site tells me no pricing info at all, only how swell it is.

or maybe i'm just not looking right.

[litch.livejournal.com]

This site says 35k

Me again

[(Anonymous)]

Now that is good positive info, Glad to see it amongst all the downer stuff, I mean really Uncle Mike, Headless corpses, You are still a bit on the morbid side arent ya? Oh and you have confessed to your friends you have a niece who is a Christian,and you like her very much? I certainly hope you dont lump me on the ninth plane of hell just below George and Osama.LOL

Love Paula