My goal is to harness the power of dry ice sublimation to power a Hero's engine. Should I put the dry ice inside the Hero's engine, or directly underneath the Hero's engine, and why??
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As described previously, design your Hero's engine with an opening at the top that can be tightly closed - perhaps an Erlenmeyer flask fitted with a double hole stopper into which angled bent glass has been inserted. Use the link http://physics.kenyon.edu/EarlyApparatus… that shows the various designs to help you.
Once the Hero's engine is designed and you're ready for a trial run, place warm water (hot tap water) in the flask drop in a piece of dry ice, then immediately replace the stopper and push it in. Try to design a way for the flask to rotate without getting all tangled up in the suspension cords, strings, or what ever is holding it up. In my mind when I initially envisioned a possible engine, I saw a three-holed rubber stopper; two for the propulsion vents (arranged something like a swastika when view from above) and the third fitted with a pressure gauge. Perhaps your school has some, I know when I taught high school science, we had several in our Principles of Technology equipment. Now, get to work. Remember, dry ice and hot water in the Hero's engine. It's the venting of the expanding CO2 that spins the engine and its the heat from the hot water that's providing the initial energy. Your engine is extracting this energy from the water, transferring it to the CO2, then venting the CO2.
Once the Hero's engine is designed and you're ready for a trial run, place warm water (hot tap water) in the flask drop in a piece of dry ice, then immediately replace the stopper and push it in. Try to design a way for the flask to rotate without getting all tangled up in the suspension cords, strings, or what ever is holding it up. In my mind when I initially envisioned a possible engine, I saw a three-holed rubber stopper; two for the propulsion vents (arranged something like a swastika when view from above) and the third fitted with a pressure gauge. Perhaps your school has some, I know when I taught high school science, we had several in our Principles of Technology equipment. Now, get to work. Remember, dry ice and hot water in the Hero's engine. It's the venting of the expanding CO2 that spins the engine and its the heat from the hot water that's providing the initial energy. Your engine is extracting this energy from the water, transferring it to the CO2, then venting the CO2.