It is supposed to be maintenance free and very quiet. OTOH, it costs over 10K, so has most of its appeal for remote homes and boats.

in theory it can turn any source of heat into electricity, in silence and with 100 per cent efficiency.

Second law of thermodynamics. You can never have 100% efficiency.

Adam Higginbotham is an ignoramus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paV5jEnR2Oo

the prospect of clueless users loose on them moving far too fast for pedestrians to get out of the way…

That’s why those mini-scooters are so popular. And why “reinventing the wheel” in this case is not needed.

Now that I’m thinking about it, with the amount of Segways given to police forces combined with the fact that the main innovation of the Segway is auto-balancing, could there be a potential military use for the technology Kamen is devising?

There’s simply something odd and creepy about the way he presents his science to the world.

Because the Stirling cycle is a hot gas cycle they face a huge problem with parasitic heat losses. Gases have low heat capacity and low thermal conductivity compared to most solids, which means that the heat in a Stirling engine wants to go almost anywhere except the working fluid.

This is why Stirling engines have been around for 200 years but only found a few niche applications where mechanical simplicity, low vibration, and sealed operation are important. Historically that has meant mostly space craft and submarines.

The challenge for a Stirling designer is to build it out of materials that have, low heat capacity and thermal conductivity, and good mechanical properties, which is not an easy combination. Some solar conversion facilities, which run at quite high temperatures relative to most Stirling applications, are currently practical.

The advantage of a Stirling/hybrid is fuel neutrality. Because Stirlings are external combustion engines they aren’t restricted to burning liquid fuels. If you had a practical Stirling/hybrid car you could run it on coal or wood or elephant dung or switchgrass.

So I’m not going to count Kamen out on this, despite my misgivings about his penchant for showmanship. There are real problems still to be solved that are of an entirely practical, nuts-and-bolts engineering nature, so he certainly has something to do. And the basic idea of a Stirling/hybrid is sound: use a constant speed heat engine to generate electricity which you use to turn the wheels, like a diesel-electric locomotive.

I’ll believe he has something practical when I see it, but it’s a good problem to be working on right now.

Despite my loathing for the Segway, I’m inclined to admire Dean Kamen, he’s clearly a brilliant guy, and that kind of earnest desire to solve problems with his inventions is awesome. I’m more inclined to place my faith in his stirling engines than in the Aussie perpetual motion snake-oil salesman also featuring on BB today…

Best use of a segway ever? As a comic prop by Wil Arnett as GOB Bluth :D

Want to watch Arrested Development now…

As has been pointed out, for people with certain disabilities, the Sedgeway is probably great, but for most people, it’s an inferior solution compared to something that has existed for well over a century and keeps getting better.

They’re one constant in a changing world; they were there for Goddard & Tsiolkovsky, there for Fulton and Watt, and were undoubtedly there for Hero when he showed off the first steam engine.

Every one of the artifacts they surround themselves with is the product of someone with a vision whose friends and relatives all say they’re nuts.

However, this is still exciting. It looks like he has adapted the engines for new applications.

in theory it can turn any source of heat into electricity, in silence and with 100 per cent efficiency.

In theory we could have emissions free fusion reactors running off seawater providing all the power we could ever need. In theory.

I hope Kamen does get places with the Stirling, and if he does, I like to think we can ultimately credit his father Jack’s work for EC Comics as putting the futurism in his son.

I’m glad I don’t get out enough.

I guarantee that Adam Higginbotham did /not/ source the “100 percent efficiency” line from Kamen – As the world’s most incredible engineer, he has probably designed an autonomous machine that seeks out and backs into a corner anyone who claims that he’s said any such thing.

Given that hybrid electric / petrol vehicles are well-studied enough to be commercially available, shouldn’t it be trivial for a good engineer to plug his power source into a pre-made hybrid car?

Disclaimer: I know nothing about hybrid cars. I’m probably talking out of my arse, and hate when people do this about my specialty. Still, this is the internet, where unfounded punditry is not just allowed, but lauded!

With that off my chest, let me just say to the above article, I’ll believe it when I see it. Sterling engines are great and all, but they are not magical. Sterling engines just make it a lot easier to burn other things for power. If that was the only challenge, the whole energy thing would be done and over with. You can retool a modern engine to burn other things, it just isn’t terribly easy. As much as we whine about gas prices, not much else out there is any cheaper and thus worth burning. If ethanol or cow shit turned out to be massively more economically and we actually had a supply that could meet the demand, we would be merrily burning it in our cars.

So, a Sterling engine is nothing to get excited over. On top of that, sterling engine “designers” often fall into the same traps of perpetual motion machine “designers”. They, with awesome regularity, vastly overestimate how efficient their engine actually is and what its performance is. We get insane performance and efficiency claims pretty much all the time from them and they turn out to be complete bullshit pretty much 100% of the time.

Someone wake me up when they actually stick it in a car.

There are tons of scientists and inventors out there who do more but with less of a publicity budget.

Being a visionary doesn’t mean creating a cult of personality.