Jackrabbit Finished
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| Finished engine. |
While the house windows are on order, I completed the building of
the Jackrabbit engine. The pistons and vessels are completely air tight.
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| Air cooler. |
The water cooling coil in the second engine worked so well (25ºC maintained) ,
I put an air cooler in the first engine also.
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| Controller and relays. |
I mounted the Arduino micro-controller and the relay boards in a
box. I have a well working Arduino program that runs the engine.
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| Pressure in vessel A (black), pressure in B (blue), RPM (red), relays(magenta) |
A host
computer graphical interface allows me to tweak the engine
timing in real time and record engine telemetry. The fans move the air from
cold to hot spaces in about a second without causing stray electrical
interference now. The heaters maintain 85ºC with about 120 watts of power.
Unfortunately, the engine is still not self sustaining. I
tried many timing schemes but the flywheel eventually comes to a stop. The
amount of friction in the system does
not seem to be excessive, so I believe the problem lies with the small amount
of torque that the engine produces.
Even if I did manage to get this engine to be self sustaining, I don’t think it
could generate enough electricity to power the fans.
