A linear generator can switch between a variety of fuel types without losing efficiency.
The creation of this generator began in the Stanford Advanced Energy Systems Laboratory.
Mainspring Energy offers the technology commercially—the first installation happened in 2020, and use cases have continued to grow.
A linear generator provides the type of fuel flexibility that industries could previously only dream of. A 14-year development project that started in Stanford University’s Advanced Energy Systems Laboratory, the linear generator is a real-world accomplishment, able to switch between various fuel sources to keep power running, no matter the situation.
“The linear generator can quickly switch between different types of green—and no-so-green, if need be—fuel, including biogas, ammonia, and hydrogen,” Matt Screck, Mainspring Energy co-founder, writes in IEEE Spectrum. “It has the potential to make the decarbonized power system available, reliable, and resilient against the vgaries of weather and fuel supplies.”
While at Stanford, Screck worked on a project meant to efficiently convert chemical-bond energy into something more immediately useful on a macro scale. Early ideas employed fuel and air inside a closed chamber with movable walls. As those walls moved toward each other, they compressed the fuel-air mixture, causing the molecules within the mixture to collided faster and faster until they broke apart and re-formed into different molecules. This process released the energy stored in chemical bonds, and Screck says it all happened without a spark, or any other ignition source.
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This cycle continued on, with the walls moving in and out releasing the previous group of molecules and letting new fuel and air in. A 2008 test was simple, and didn’t harvest the produced energy, but itdid allow the team to measure the efficiency of the concept.
“The results were excellent, the device was efficient as a fuel cell, just as we hoped,” Screck writes. “Now we had to build a version that could generate and run for years at a reasonable cost.”
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So, in 2010, Mainspring Energy was born to build the flameless compression reaction generators.
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The team crafted a new machine that tied the compression and expansion motion directly to electricity generation. And their creation works not just in tailored lab settings, but in several real-world scenarios. In one system, a Mainspring generator pairs with a 3.3-megawatt rooftop solar array. When the sun shines, the generators turn off, but when the sun isn’t available, the generators turn on to immediately provide “precisely as much power as the building require.”
“The linear generator is fuel-agnostic,” Screck writes. “It can run a wide range of fuels including natural gas, biogas, hydrogen, ammonia, syngas, and even alcohols without compromising performance.” Many of these fuel sources already have commercial applications.
Screck says he sees the linear generator as key to a zero-carbon grid, due to its flexibility to handle nearly any scale of power and ability to run on almost any fuel. What a powerhouse.
