Magnetic Air Engine

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Tom Stanton has been doing a ton of work on refining this kind of air-powered engine design over on his channel, you guys should collaborate! Tomatoes are disgusting!

It's Interesting how I never thought of that but it kinda makes sense if you think about it. It would be interesting to see this design taken further and being used on a vehicle (small car, maybe even RC :-)

Some thoughts for improvements... 1. Reduce the volume of air after the "ignition valve" (the one providing air to the cylinder). As it currently is, the pressure shoots up when the valve is open - compressing the entire volume not just the cylinder. It seemed like it was a sort of loopy hose. If the volume there is high enough, it won't be able to fully depressurize when the piston is at bottom and the exhaust ports are open. If it doesn't fully depressurize, then the piston will have to fight the remaining pressure in order to get back to the top of the cylinder. 2. Rather than use a second valve, consider just using a pressure regulator between your high pressure source and the bottle. The bottle can be a smaller one; but the opening should be fairly open -- otherwise you could just use a CO2 canister that you previously emptied. By using a pressure regulator, you won't need a controller. You could then have a source bank of a few of the CO2 canisters, the regulator, a small bottle, the ignition valve and then the piston... it should fit in a model ship if you wanted to do some gear reduction to a paddle wheel or something like that... 3. Lastly, because you are starting with compressed air, there could be a different way to go about it. Consider a wheel with multiple scoops out of its outer edge. These scoops should be something more like a J profile so that one side was very sloped and the other very "catchy". For the simplest design the outer case would have air input ports and air output ports spaced around. The length of the scoops should be such that no two adjacent ports would be open at the same time. You should consider a different number of scoops (say perhaps six) verses sets of input/output ports (perhaps five) -- so that there should always be an input port open to one of the scoops at all times... thus self starting. The wheel itself would be the flywheel... so you could space some nuts around it for mass. You could use magnets if you wanted to in order to use the controller to adjust the pressure to get a desired speed. The first version could just leave the air pressure on all of the time. If you wanted to get more efficient, you could have an "ignition valve" for each input port. Use a single magnet in the flywheel to make the timing right for all of the input ports. Just some ideas, lots of luck...

you can add a pressure regulator to the tank so that the perfomance of the engine stays constant throughout most of the tank pressures

Just put dry ice in the bottle and it will constantly keep the pressure up. You could add a safety mechanism to release the pressure if it gets too high.

Its always great seeing his face lightup as his machines start to work

A suggestion for increased runtime as well as possible torque would be to use a 4500 psi (approx. 310 bar) compressed air cylinder that they use in paintball. The cylinders are about the size of a 1 liter bottle and contain a large volume of air at an extremely high pressure. You could increase the pressure maintained from 2 bars to 4 bars to see how that works out.

Use a 1-litre scuba tank and a first-stage pressure reducer. Then you have 200 litres in 200 bars reduced to 8 bars. These tanks are common in the diving community as "argon" tanks for dry suits ( but everybody just uses them with cheaper air). Just fill at any dive shop for under a euro. Any other size tank (0,1 to 15 litres) is usable too.

I suggested this to Tom as well but I think you could get a big jump in efficiency by implementing a helmholtz resonator around the exhaust ports such that after the pressure spike it cycles to a low pressure for the next cycle's exhaust phase. If you can get down to atmospheric or lower pressure in the cylinder on the up stroke it'd take a lot of waste out of the engine.

If you want to increase max RPM, consider using two solenoid valves in parallel. That way you can alternate between the two, theoretically doubling the rate which you can supply air to the engine.

It seems like this would be an easy way to make a silent or quiet motor for a small jigsaw or sawZall. Adding an idling mechanism would increase the run time by keeping it at a constant speed and evening out the weight on the main gear and shortening the top nail would help with efficiency(if you're still using the nail) but giving it a good balance and even another chamber or spring (like a Stirling engine) would be an interesting improvement. I would love to see you make a Jumping Cubli!!!

Brilliant job, I think, increasing your co2 input and more bottles will allow you to support more volume, but other than that it is brilliant. Would also like to see a small force or drag to see if it has the force needed to move an object

You should probably make a collab with Tom Stanton because he made a similar air engine that he has been perfecting.

To utilize the full potential of the electrical valve you should, instead of the magnet switch use a sliding contact on the flywheel (like a contact breaker in an old engine), this would allow you to not just open the valve at exactly top dead center, giving you more power and better efficiency, but also give you the ability to tune the engine for power/ run duration by varying the length of the metal strip: Top dead center to ~90 degress of rotation for longer running time | Top dead center to exposure point of the outlets for maximal power Edit: Alternatively you could use a cam & microswitch, instead of a sliding contact, this would be easier to set up, but you'd have to deal with imbalence of the flywheel caused by adding the cam.

what i Love with 3d printing is that you can mould Ideas into shape, and that makes it easier to understand and see where can you improve your product

Now that you have the cylinders triggering their own pressurization, you could add more cylinders and perhaps a small gear instead of a fixed axel. You could demonstrate the pros and cons of inline vs v shaped engines. My son loves this video. Very informative and safe!

As a car guy who loves your videos, it would be very cool to see this design implemented in an inline, multicylinder engine! Much love Integza!

If you put the magnet on the crank wheel, you could adjust the engine timing by moving the hall effect sensor around it - that way you could pre-fire the solenoid valve and get it to go faster :)

Great video! Instead of using a soda bottle go to a brewing store and look for brown pet bottles, they can handle more pressure and come in loads of sizes. On top of that the same store sell fittings for these bottles and other fittings/lines/tanks for CO_2