Dean Kamen has developed another coo-coo bananas vehicle — this time a scooter that can burn anything that burns as fuel.
Gizmag reports about the scooter and has renderings:
Built around a fairly conventional battery and electric motor combination to provide the drive to the wheel, something Kamen’s experience with the much-hyped Segway makes relatively easy, the radical part of the design is the inclusion of a Stirling engine to recharge the bike’s battery pack. Based on technology that pre-dates the internal combustion engine by nearly a century, the Stirling engine is closer in concept to a steam engine, using external combustion, and without the need for a fuel that can be injected and burned incredibly fast inside a normal engine’s combustion chamber, it can run on virtually anything that burns – opening the door to easily renewable fuels rather than relying on dwindling fossil fuel supplies.
Although the prototype bike has yet to be shown in public, unlike Kamen’s Stirling-engined car which has been demonstrated several times, Kamen himself is understood to have been using the prototype to zip around his own estate.
In April, Kamen partnered with GM on the PUMA, a a two-wheeled, electric-powered urban transportation vehicle. And of course, Kamen unveiled the Segway Human Transporter in 2001.
Posted by Brendan Lynch
Tags: Dean Kamen, Segway
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I love the concept. I’d change the write-up a bit though. Stirling engines don’t necessarily require “virtually anything that burns”. The fuel possibilities are greater than that! What the engines require is a source of heat – any source of heat. That allows such things as direct nuclear power, geo-thermal heat and chemical reactions. There are model Sterling engines that run from the heat of a cup of coffee. There are even models that run from the heat of a person’s hand.