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Segway Inventor Turns To Environment
MBCook writes "CNN has an article in which they talk about Dean Kamen's latest inventions designed to provide water to rural villages. His goal is also to provide electricity and opportunities for entrepreneurship. From the article: 'Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,' says Kamen. 'The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.'"
The rumormill says this time, "it" will consist of a rider on the segway carrying water bottles for the needy.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Finally, a product that's worth a crap!
What he should be doing is marketing this to rural farmers in developed countries. If I lived on a farm with access to the fuel, I would love to have a kilowatt generator for $1000 to supplement my electricity use.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.'"
Apparently he's not too concerned about giving them clean air, though.
Anyone know what the energy density of cow dung is? I assume it takes a few cow patties to fule a sterling engine powered generator that puts out 1kW. Bet it takes a lot more to boil enough dirty water to produce 1000L a day of distilled water.
Years ago, relief organizations drilled wells in India and Pakistan to provide clean disease-free water to the poor populations. Indeed, it did reduce the levels of illness and was hailed as a public health victory. Unfortunately, it turned out that this underground water had high levels of arsenic that poisoned the people over time. Now they are seeing high levels of skin, lung, liver, kidney and bladder cancer. So let's hope things go better this time.
I've had an idea for a while for a solar-powered water condensor. The condensation run off from the window-unit air conditioners in my house generate about 100 liters every 24 hours. Granted, the compressors and fans use a lot of power, but I figure that you could have a big solar panel - maybe 3 or 4 square meters - on top of a 10 foot pole so kids wouldn't mess with it, and you could get several hundred watts out of it. Relatively cheap to make, simple to run, and I've seen these window units run for years without maintenance. Seems like it'd be quite doable, and with a lot less complexity and potential to wear or break than a boiler-driven generator like what Segway Boy has in mind.
A-Bomb
Kamen's Segway fiasco was a mistake. Now he's back on track.
If he just leaned that way, wouldn't his platform make the turn for him?
Forward/Stop/Reverse is controlled by leaning, but steering is controlled by turning the control on the left side of the handlebars. Maybe future Segways will feature lean-stearing.
* One well-armed team of entrepreneurs to protect the machines from the covetous warlords, militias, kleptocracies, etc. which are the real "pandemic" of the Third World.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
his company was not responsible for all the hype building up to Segway's release. they have made a ton of incredibly useful inventions and i would think anyone with any interest in technology or engineering would know about his work long before the Segway. inventing a portable insulin pump seems like a pretty valid invention, right? a wheelchair that can climb stairs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen/
or
http://www.dekaresearch.com/
The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.
So now, instead of a village in the Phillipines using relatively clean water that's been percalating through a forested area, they will just burn even more of the trees to power their water cleaners, resulting in even more of this (which surviving local villagers said was due to illegal logging on the surrounding hills). Yes, TFA indicates that it's cow dung that will be burned... but that just means that the wholesome goodness of that dung is not going into agricultural fertilization, which means either shipping in artificial/processed fertilizers, or very inefficiently using more land for grazing and crop production... including cutting into forests (see above).
Yes, most of us "burn things" for clean water (to extract from a well, or to run a municipal water treatment facility), but things like this at the local level strike me as putting a tiny, tiny bandage on the symptom of a much larger problem. To wit: too many freakin' people in areas not developed enough to sustain them without very poor land use. I mean... a kilowatt? Between solar, and perhaps some of the village kids taking turns in a big hamster wheel, you could do that without burning more stuff. And, for someone who included the notion of improving the "leisure time" of poor villagers, he's not thinking too clearly about the delightful aroma that comes with 24x7 burning of cow dung.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe, maybe not, but look at his other work before deciding.
If Benjerman Franklin was only considered for his stove*, he would be considered a failure.
While they work extremely well if kept stoked, once they began to cool a little, they got extremely smokey. Meaning they weren't practical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But these sorts of projects are what the guy actually cares about.
After he made his initial fortune (in medical devices) he started up an organization called FIRST, designed to get more smart kids interested in engineering, and to help our culture value problem solving more than drama. Since then the organization has grown to include thousands of teams, tens of thousands of high schoolers in countries all around the world.
I've been working with one of those teams for three years, and every year Kamen stands up and gives a speech, not about how much fun we're going to have building robots, but about his vision for what we can do to solve these sort of engineering problems, to bring clean water to those who need it, etc. He's done a lot of good work, aside from his kind of whacky human transport device, and for all that his speeches are about as depressing and boring as you can get, it's very clear that this is where his heart is. He's put a ton of money and effort into getting people into engineering so that some day if he can't solve these sorts of problem someone will.
And for as bored as I am every time I have to sit through him talking about it, I can admire that. This is about things a lot more important than a goofy looking scooter.
I'm usually skeptical of a lot of efforts to solve poverty through technology- but this is definitely headed in the right direction. In my opinion, the most pressing needs in the developing world are the most basic ones: clean water, food, medical care, roads, electricity, basic literacy. Laptops or whatever are way down on the list because their potential payoff is relatively small compared to their cost. Things like clean water and cheap electricity could have big payoffs with relatively little investment; if you're suffering from less disease your productivity will go up, if you have light in the evening your kids can do their homework and the parents can do more work.
Whether or not he's got the solution, he's at least got the right problems.
From TFA: A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their leisure times. -- Yes, and then it's all downhill from there: first light bulbs, then telephones for telemarketers to call, televisions for advertisers to stuff with their ads all aglow, microwave ovens to provide late-night high-fat carbohydrate-laden heart sludge, personal computers from which to have one's identity stolen, not to mention thirty-five clocks to set forward every Spring, etc. I hope these people who have lived in the beautiful nighttime darkness for so long know what they're getting themselves into.
The Big News Page
Segway is just a basic, two-wheel version of his iBot wheelchair. You know, the wheelchair that can climb stairs and raise the user up high enough to talk to standing adults? The wheelchair that's based on all of the inventions that made the Segway possible.
Segway isn't a fiasco, it's an overhyped consumer toy. He probably makes a handsome profit from it.
Yes.
And now I ask you - what good would a third wheel do for a wheelchair that climbs stairs? Especially when it already has more than three wheels.
The gyroscope was so that the chair would stay level when it had to go up on its hind wheels to climb the stairs.
www.linuxpenguin.net
Water-borne diseases are a HUGE problem in the third world. Seriously, they have *fatal* diarrhea, and I'm not saying that to be funny.
This would be fucking great for fish farms.
Fisheries generate a lot of crap-filled water that generally gets pumped into (and pollutes) a local river.
Of course, this guy's invention would have to be scaled waaaaay up for farmers of any kind in the 1st world, since they have enormous plots of land compared to most farms in 3rd world & developing countries.
Still, Kudos to him, because he's right. Finding potable water is actually a greater problem than access to food in most of the 3rd world. However, the second you increase survival rates in those developing countries, you create a host of other problems as the population increases.
Countries are like ecosystems, once you fiddle with one variable, you usually have to deal with a rash of unintended consequences.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What's very interesting about village microloans is the extremely low rate of default. When you have a group of people involved in ensuring that a loan is repaid, especially in small matriarchal societies, you end up with as little as a 5% default rate.
Nice idea but boiling water (100C/212F) won't kill most bacteria in 5 minutes.
Steralizing is usually done via steam at 2atm( 250-275F IIRC) for 15 minutes. Plus it doesn't remove contaminants. Mud + heat = dryer mud.
Most of the water purification systems use either an evaporation/condensation cycle or reverse osmosis through a semi-permiable membrane.
Of the 2, evap/cond is both more reliable and more scaleable. As a bonus, you can literally do it with 2 coconuts and a banana leaf.
Just because the Segway wasn't commercially successful, that doesn't mean it wasn't a good invention. Dean's problem was trying to replace cars with Segways. The Segway is designed to replace walking, though, not driving, according to its speed and the fact that it offers no protection from harsh weather or poor road conditions. The idea of marketing the Segway to the Postal Service was a good one, though it had that one design flaw (the Segway toppling over when the battery runs out) which could be fixed pretty easily, if Dean wants to re-release the product. Anyway, the Segway appears to be successful in Japan, where they replaced everything above the platform and it's remote controlled: http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?en try_id=1298966
It's been fifteen years since I was in the water treatment business, but I doubt any of the fundamentals have changed.
Here's how it works: You mix a chemical called a 'flocculant' in with the water, which has been roughly filtered and perhaps let sit for a while to let any silt settle. This water is then mixed with air under high pressure, and pumped into tanks, entering halfway between the bottom and top of the tank with as little turbulence as possible. Because of the decrease in pressure, air bubbled form, and the flocculants cause small particles (bacteria, shit, uranium) to stick to them. The bubbles then gradually float to the surface, where the 'suds' or 'scum' is skimmed off, again with a minimal amount of turbulence. After enough of this happens, the water is then called clean and sucked out and wasted on fertilizing laws.
Generally, this is done on a continuous basis, and the equipment is a big, round vat. The ones I knew were from 5 to 23 meters in diameter. There's some real issues that make this process a bit more tricky than the description above would make it seem:
1) raw water is not produced, nor clean water consumed, at uniform rates. However, the filtering equipment works correctly at a very small flow/pressure. Holding tanks on either side are neccessary.
2) Flocculant is a consumable, and it takes a certain amount to clean a given volume of water to a certain improvement. Costs money.
3) water is not uniformly dirty.
4) generally, the larger units can let water stay and bubbles float (and grit sink to the bottom) longer, so less flocculant is needed. But these take up more space...LOTS more.
5) How clean does water really need to be? If there's some nasty outbreak (Cholera, Giardia) maybe it needs to be much cleaner. Maybe not so much at other times. Who makes that decision? My thoughts are that tap water should only be cleaned to a certain percent, which can be used for lawns / car-washes / firefighting / pools, cleaned a bit further for household uses (laundry, bathing) by an in-home filter, and cleaned further for drinking by a tap-based carbon filter (Brita, etc). But this is a lot of equipment. Real serious policy issues here. I doubt that such a poor and corrupt country as Bangladesh can handle these problems correctly. But hey, I guess eomthing is worth a try.
If he can get it to run off of old AOL CDs the power problem is solved for all of us.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
is good governance and a lot less corruption. A lot of those other things would take care of themselves if you took care of the first two. And without it, you're not going to get the other things. Look at Zimbabwe. Used to be the largest net exporter of food in Africa. Corruption, mismanagement, and ethnic violence by the indigenous blacks against white farmers have turned the place into a pauper's paradise, complete with famine and babies being thrown into sewers.
As for roads, they used aid money to build roads in the Congo. Nobody uses them (for the most part). They use the bush trails. Same thing with schools.
Until you (or they) solve the tribalism and corruption issues in the development world, all we are doing is throwing good money after bad in offering up "solutions".
What will happen when you magically solve the clean water, food, and medical care issues in the developing world? Population explosion even worse than they are experiencing today, without the social revolutions that preceeded and enabled the developed world's evolution. And at the end of the line, population crash, and more misguided intervention on the part of the developed world.
If this particular Stirling engine design is capable of being made in volume at a sensible price and is not simply an over-priced toy for rich yacht owners like the WhisperGen, it deserves to succeed.
One reason it might just is crime. You could make a perfectly adequate generator for a village using standard technology, but it would get stolen in no time. A washing machine sized design is going to be much harder to steal.
However, as with many alternative technologies, the likely problem is going to be seals. Seals have been the problem with Stirling engines in the past (and are the continuing problem with the Wankel.)
Pining for the fjords
You know, everything American isn't bad. When 100% of your time is taken up by trying to produce enough food and shelter to keep you alive, it doesn't leave a hell of lot of time for inventing, creating, and enjoying life. Are you sitting in a shack with no electricity exhausted from a day of backbreaking work on a sustenance farm drinking brown water and hoping you'll live long enough to see your kids grow up?
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.
What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.
To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.
Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The LEGO Mindstorms beloved to so many Slashdotters are used by 9-14 year olds (basically grades 4-8) in the FIRST LEGO League International, which has participants in almost 2 dozen countries.
:)
And since last year, within the US they've been piloting a "Junior FIRST LEGO League" for ages 6-9. I just found out about it, and my daughter's in that age range... bet she'll be happy to hear.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
FTA: Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and electricity to the world's poor.
But... but... doesn't he realize that when you mix water and electricity, people get electrocuted?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
All jokes aside, pipes from central plants are a LOT more expensive than locally created potable water. A 2" diameter PVC pipe costs a little over $2/foot. That's over $10K per mile. Now add the cost of burying the pipe or otherwise securing it from harm.
Kamen's idea is better.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The condensation run off from the window-unit air conditioners in my house generate about 100 liters every 24 hours.
First of all, I'm calling bullshit on this. Either you live in a swamp, or there's something wrong with your air conditioner. Buy a new one and save the world 1kWh/day instead of producing distilled water with electricity.
Secondly, you realize you're advocating air conditioning as a means of water purification for undeveloped nations? That's just goofy.
Then you say a "3 or 4 square meter" solar panel is "cheap to make". And, assuming such a thing would even run a single air conditioner, you'd need one for, say, every two African villagers. Let's say this contraption costs $2000, which is a conservative figure. To outfit 100 million Africans, you're talking about $100 billion. And then of course who knows how long the things will last and whether they will be immediately confiscated by warlords and diverted to people who are actually productive enough to afford solar panels.
So, by now we've gotten to the point where you've completely lost your mind. As further evidence, "with a lot less complexity... than a boiler-driven generator". Umm, okay.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The late 20th century reversal of this process is being played out in the American economy (as well as other industrialized countries worldwide). Local entrepreneurs are being pushed and bought out of business by large concerns (i.e. national and multi-national corporations). The economy of scale and polical clout of these giants are impossible to compete with effectively for most small, individual run businesses. The effect is to drain profit out of local economies and into a much larger scale economy. This robs resources from local-scale economies, and makes them less self-sustaining. Overall the economic engine seems to be running better, but fewer people benefit. The resultant concentration of resources eventually make such systems unstable.
The idea outlined in the article is brillant. I suspect, though, it will never come to pass. Not because it won't work, but because it will work. As soon as small scale success begins to be seen, larger concerns will interrupt the process, buying out the local entrepreneurs, and concentrating production and profit where it is subject to corruption and incompetence.
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
tap water should only be cleaned to a certain percent, which can be used for lawns / car-washes / firefighting / pools, cleaned a bit further for household uses (laundry, bathing) by an in-home filter, and cleaned further for drinking by a tap-based carbon filter (Brita, etc). But this is a lot of equipment.
I'm sure that due to economies of scale, the water utility can purify a given amount of water more efficiently than I can. (Those Brita filters are expensive!) So here's a better idea:
Run two pipes to every home. The big pipe carries minimally-cleaned water, and the small pipe carries water purified to human consumption standards. The lawn sprinkler system uses water straight out of the big pipe. For laundry and bathing, use a blend of, say, 70% from the big pipe and 30% from the small pipe.
It's kind of like how Sunoco stations used to sell about six different grades of gasoline. There were only two tanks in the ground, and the pump mixed the top-shelf stuff with the base stuff to achieve the desired octane.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
TFA says, "The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it." If it vaporizes the water, couldn't it also be used to desalinate seawater? That would be a boon for poor dry coastal villages, like in Baja California.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
If he can make one of those cheap generators run on feline poo, I'm buying one! My cat craps more than any living thing I've ever seen. And judging by the near-nuclear potency of whatever comes out of that cat's ass, I'd say I should be able to power my house for quite a while!
Reaching out to poor rural villages where 2/3rds of humanity lives is an admirable goal.
I've been reading that micro-loans, (micro-banks, micro- capitalism) is having a revolutionary effect in some of these villages too. The concept is to lend a small amount of money e.g. $50 to $200 to someone who would could not save that much money beforehand or a bank would find too much trouble to deal with. With that small amount of money the borrower buys some device like a peddle sewing machine, an irrigation pump, a kiln, etc. and improves their business. Early results are the entreupeneurs improve their incomes by an order magnitude. And the loan default rate is no worse than for a middle-class urban borrower. These micro-loans are really growing the rural economies where they are availble.
Biosand Filter.
Cost - about thirty bucks.
Technology - rudimentary.
Efficiency - "Overall, these studies have shown that the Biosand filter removes:
More than 90% of fecal coliform; 100% of protozoa and helminths; 50-90% of organic and inorganic toxicants; 95-99% of zinc, copper, cadmium and lead; 67% of iron and manganese; 47% of arsenic; all suspended sediments" (So it's not going to help with that arsenic-tainted water in India.)
IMO, there is no better filtration system. Cheap, low-tech, highly effective against the most common pathogens -- why should we be using anything else?!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
OT...I dump turtleshit-laden pondwater on part of my yard, and the plants there have exploded with lush growth. My friends joke that I should bottle and sell it.
I'm gonna need more turtles.
Man, you really need that seminar!
In some ways, first-world farmers are efficient (or at least, productive). The production outputs by one farmer these days is pretty amazing, compared to even 30 years ago. But it sucks up a LOT of energy resources. There is a swing in some areas to methods that take fewer inputs, yet receive the same or nearly the same production outputs that "traditional" methods use. No-till seed drilling, dual-cropping, etc are some of the ways to it.
For those who question it, have you ever seen pictures from when wheat was harvested with horse-drawn equipment? Lessee... 40-horse team was not uncommon, a crew to run the steam engine and thresher, where to put the mountain of straw? Lots of work for teenage boys stacking sacks of grain. It used to be a MAJOR endeavor. Now 4 or 5 combine drivers, a couple of tractors to pull grain wagons around, and a couple of trucks to take grain to the driers or silos, and 1000 acres/day harvested is not impossible.
Where I live (Willamette Valley, OR) is the major rye and fescue grass seed production areas in the US. Some of the methods people use require LOTS of work, yet my neighbor, who is big into no-till, does just fine with his no-till drill (he does a lot of custom no-till planting, too), plus doesn't spend a lot of time in the fall and spring removing cover crop or stubble, prepping the soil (plowing, discing, pulverizing, smoothing), etc. His no-till drill just sticks the seed right in. Sure, no-till is not for every crop, but it works well for grass.
He doesn't have a lot of bare fields this year, which is kind of luck of the draw given the rains here this winter. But other farmers, who have hundreds of acres of bare or fall-planted fields right now where the seed is just now starting to germinate (and don't do no-till), have suffered some pretty significant soil erosion this winter. Kind of sad, realizing all the topsoil that has been washed into the rivers. Plus, there is all the topsoil they convert into dust in the summer and fall, too.
Dairy farms are more and more starting to either make biogas generators (i.e., covering up the manure pits and piping the gas into compressors and burning it in generators. Makes sense if you've ever driven past an open manure pit on a hot summer day) or other equipment that rapidly breaks down the manure into water and solid products. But this equipment costs some pretty good coin.
yes, some of these equipment installations are because of environmental concerns of either waste water leaking into groundwater supplies or air quality concerns, but still... some of this is being done.
the average feedlot, however, probably is not into this as much. If you have enough manure volume, yes, there is a smallish side market of processing the manure pile into mulch or compost, but that's about it. Except for some special product areas (zoo poop, pelletized poultry waste), it's pretty low margin, so you need a lot of manure to make a go of it. it's pretty seasonal, too. Some environmental concerns are driving this kind of equipmentop,l for other livestock production as well (poultry, pork).
Me and my 30 or so sheep? Well, the sheep poop is good for the pasture. As long as I'm not taking the sheep off and putting them in someone's freeezers, it is a relatively closed loop as far as my pastures go (I don't need to fertilize a lot!).
Good governance is a side-effect of affluence
Cart before the horse, I'm afraid. Wealth doesn't buy good governance. Example, the Middle East nations that contain a good deal of the world's oil. Good governance can, however, create wealth. Example, South Korea. In 1954, it was one of the poorest nations in the world, on par with the poorest in Africa. Today, it's a first world nation with the world's 12th largest economy. Democratization, in the case of South Korea, proceeded slowly, but good governance, and the sociological factors were there in 1954, and wealth followed
It was when the European middle-class began to develop that democracy began to sprout in Europe.
Um, no. The Magna Carta didn't come about because a bunch of burghers were pressing for their rights. It was a squabble between rich nobles and an even richer king. And yet, it's one of the most significant democratizing documents in human history. And has absolutely nothing to do with a middle class.
Another significant democratizing influences were things like the Protestant Reformation. Again, had nothing to do with the middle class. Once you have a group of people with some free time on their hands, they can start hassling their government, getting involved in politics, giving money to the right people to fund the right initiatives, etcetera.
Affluence breeds democracy, and democracy preserves affluence. A quick look at the history of the US should demonstrate that to you.
Absurd, and obviously false given the facts.
You seem to think it's like a recipe. Have some wealth, bake for a period, and voila! Democracy! Good government! Um, no. The Roman Empire had a large, vibrant middle class for much of it's history, enabled by good governance..and, ultimately, grinded down to serfdom by bad. For the first 100 years, most people in the United States were essentially peasant farmers. The difference between a peasant farmer who owned his land in Pennsylvania as opposed to a peasant farmer who "owned" his land in Africa, however, were little things like established property rights, the rule of law, and a well functioning government. Take out the rule of law, and a well functioning government and the US would not have made it this far.
Good governance preserves and builds wealth, and bad governance destroys it. Affluence, in and of itself, does nothing positive. A good example of this is looking at the result of windfalls, either at an individual level or a national level. On an individual level, look at lottery winners. Or a national level, look at what happened to Spain and its New World fortune. Squandered. Or Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. It's in the process of being squandered. And again compare them to South Korea. South Korea had good governance before they had wealth.
Good governance, btw, isn't the same thing as democracy. You can have a poorly run democracy (which won't last, of course), and a well run autocracy. South Korea, for much of it's history, was a well run autocracy.
Wealth will not be built and sustained in the developing world until those countries build a culture and society that is capable of sustaining a well run government first. The last and only experience most of these countries have with that is, unfortunately, the colonial administrations that ruled over them briefly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This has always been the trouble with Stirling engines. They seem simple until you actually try to make one that outputs a usable amount of power at some reasonable efficiency that doesn't cost a fortune. Many people have tried over the centuries, but so far it's always been a matter of picking which two of the three goals you want to fulfill. Dean Kamen has a nontrivial challenge ahead in trying for the Sterling hat-trick.
Don Lancaster's Blatant Opportunist #32
Wikipedia - Problems with Stirling Engines:
U.S. Patents:
6,862,883 Kamen, et al. Regenerator for a Stirling engine
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry