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Hero's Steam Engine

This page covers a physics project / presentation that my two lab partners and I did for a past semester. Since I just finished uploading this physics project here "Making 3D / Anaglyph Videos with a CNC Machine" I figured that I might as well put this one up on the site too.

The goal of the project was to calculate the efficiency of a hero's steam engine, AKA an aeolipile. It is believed that the aeolipile is the first steam engine ever built, and its earliest documentation dates it to the first century AD. 

I'm not going to go into the details as to how exactly we conducted the experiment because it would take too much effort and nobody would read it anyway, but what we found was that the efficiency of our hero's steam engine was pretty terrible. Suffice it to say that you won't get any real power out of this thing, so don't bother building one for that purpose. Still though, it is pretty fun to watch, and it is also easy to build.

Here's the video of the one we built for the experiment.

Instructions for building a hero's steam engine can be found on this page http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/thermo/thermo.html

The picture below, which I made in Adobe Illustrator as part of the project, might also help if you want to build one.

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