Air-conditioning is energy-hungry. Stirling engines can be used to produce energy from a heat source. Since air conditioning is often used to cool workplaces and homes, and in the end, people, the energy should come from that same people.When using your body heat to power a stirling engine, it sucks your heat out and gives a sensation of coldness on the contact surface. Put your hand on it and as it starts working, it feels cold.
Imagine an office chair with an embedded stirling engine. It would cool your back by sucking your heat and use it to power... A fan ! Or charge your cell phone or any device, or even give power back to the grid.
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This would be great, but unfortunately Sterling engines need a pretty large temperature difference in order to work. Body heat isn't going to do it. At least that's the case with the Sterlings I've seen. If you think you can build a Sterling that will run off of body heat, by all means do it. It would be worth a fortune. In addition to body heat, it would make a fantastic solar energy system.
The heat generated from the body wil not be so much to get the stirling engine running. However, using the heat from the car engine may provide some useful regeneration, particularly for hybrid vehicles.
if you could actually make this work, it would be very cool. Lame pun.
Unfortunately, after you take the heat out of the chair, you'll need to do something to move the energy outside or it'll just turn back into heat in your office through friction and noise.
Hrench, no matter where the energy goes, fact is it would get out of your body! But you're definitely right, the hot part should be some distance away.
For a Stirling engine to work, there has to be a hot side and a cool side. If your body is the hot side, then the cool side will have to be much cooler than your body. So what's going to provide the coolness for the cool side? Probably your air conditioner. But if the AC is already making the air a lot cooler than your body, you don't need the Sterling engine. In fact, the Sterling engine would be running off of the AC, instead of vice-versa. This won't save any energy.
You might next suggest that it might at least make your chair cooler, even though the air would be warmer. If you want to cool your chair, it would be more effective to just put evaporator coils directly in the chair and thus refrigerate the chair itself. Even simpler would be to run a plastic tube all around inside the chair back and seat, and pump water through it. The water could then flow through a radiator behind the chair back to dissipate the heat.