Almost every great idea is born from a necessity – and who doesn’t need a cellphone charger that works everywhere without a plug?
Christian Fuchs and his classmates were tasked with building a Stirling engine for a University Project. So they decided to create one that could charge a cell phone using a candle.
A Stirling engine can produce energy with little-to-no emissions and can work practically everywhere. A cellphone charger doesn’t need a lot of energy. There are some emergency chargers that work via hand-crank on the market, but that type of manual labor is often exhausting.
That’s why a Stirling Engine is perfect for this work. It doesn’t produce too much torque like the human body but it rotates relatively fast and it can be used in remote places without electric sources.
After some months of planning and construction, the first technical drawings and assembly instructions were finished and the Stirling charger V. 1.0 was ready. Because of some engineering issues, like power optimization and production difficulties, a new version of the charger was redesigned. One month later, version 2.0 was ready for prototype production.
The first prototype of the charger was planned to be finished in February 2014 but the creators noted that their University schedules made it difficult to continue with the project.
Editor’s Note: Information about this project and its creators is no longer readily available online. There have been no updates since 2014, and much of the information from the original source has been lost. We’ve chosen to keep the article in its original state available on our site for transparency.
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