Sterling engine without cranks nor wheels

I have seen one at a model engineering exhibition where all the moving parts were water oscillating in tubes. That was quite impressive.

Mark Rand RTFM

I built one of these some years ago. It has 4" pvc 1" long for the cylinder, cd-rom for fly wheel, 1/2" styrofoam for displacer, surgical glove for diaphram, straw from wd-40, cotter pin, elect connector, small bearings, cork gaskets and brass shim stock.

You set the engine on a cup of boiling water to heat the bottom plate. It takes a 50 degree difference between the top and bottom plate to operate. It will run as high as 200RPM and as long as 45 minutes on a large cup of boiling water. You can see it here.

The styrofoam displacer has an 1/8" clearance around the inside of the cylinder. When the displacer moves up and down a 1/4", the air inside the cylinder expands or contracts, operating the diaphram. The timing is set so the displacer leads the diaphram by 90 degrees.

D> Vertical Sterling has 2 colinear pistons .

YMMD! Finally a use for those AOL-DC-ROMs! :-)) Nice little Stirling (spelling in honor of Mr. Stirling)

Nick

What's the story behind the pictures of the cable in your "electricity" section of the website?

I'm a troubleshooter for a power company. This was a fire call. The cable is called a K-cable. It's an abrasion resistant cable for going through trees. There are two 2 strand hotlegs wrapped with a concentric nuetral. Feeds a 100Amp panel in that house. Apparently it wore through or a squirrel ate it, and one of the hotlegs welded to the neutral, burning a few strands back toward the house ground. When I got there the Fire Dept was standing by, the cable was already burned in two, and the end going up the pole was burning like a highway flare, until I went up and cut it down. They put a lot of that cable up in the 60's and 70's, but they no longer make it.

Don

We had an arcing fault in a buried 4160 feeder between our substation and the main switchgear at work. It was quite exciting, with chunks of concrete flying through the air. We had to wait a number of very LONG minutes for somebody from the utility to come down and switch the substation primary power off.

As for the Stirling, you should look up Sunpower, in the 1970's they were designing solar-powered free piston Stirling engines that only had 2 moving parts - the power piston and the displacer. There is a somewhat journalistic (as opposed to being full of engineering detail) book about the whole history called "the next new thing".

Jon

Well in that case let's spell HONOUR correctly as the Rev Stirling was a Scottish minister of the Church and not an American

AWEM

Thanks Don , Mark ..

In spite of the 'setbacks" at applying the S' engine , it really does work and is easy to build and is lower cost than a steam engine if both are closed cycle ..

A solar stationary is a powerful and profitable engine . There should be less maintainance compared with steam ...

Another idea , intriguing .... Atkison engine with much larger displacement to get same power as the tiny 2400 cc engines of today .... 2ndly , as you do heat regen' , you are lossing more power . But this makes "expansion" into a much larger cylinder at lower fuel consumption . Its the expansion that turns the crank ....

Which Atkinson? The "Atkinson Cycle Engine" or the "Atkinson Differential Engine"?

So the cycle engine. Not worth the mechanical effort. Look at a p-v-diagram. Forget Atkinson-cycle, think Miller-cycle.

Nick

ha haha ha Miller only added a supercharger , trying to steal

Atkisons thunder FOOOL !!

Miller added then took away what he added !!

You get nothing from Miller , try closing the intakes earlier like a std enine AND supercharging ? DUH , no thermal gain .... ya missed the point . Atkison does get a thermal gain by reducing pumping losses which add up to a themal improvement . HP goes down per cc engine size , but you increase that , which makes the expander side more effecient ..... NET GAIN !!

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Nick Mueller wrote:

A supercharger? Miller-cycle? You are more than wrong.

Nonsense, BS, No English.

Nick