Stirling engine
A Stirling engine is a kind of heat engine that converts heat into useful mechanical energy by the movement of a piston inside a cylinder within the engine. Unlike other commonly found heat engines such as the internal combustion engine used in cars and the steam engine used on railways, it re-uses the same gas for each stroke of the piston so there is no noisy exhaust. The same gas is repeatedly heated and cooled within the engine’s cylinder.
To run it needs a supply of heat to heat its hot parts. This can come from a fire, but also from the sun’s rays, from hot rocks near a volcano or from nuclear energy. It also has cold parts which cool the gas inside it and these are kept cold by a stream of air or water flowing over them.
It was invented by a Scottish minister, Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling in 1816.
Stirling Engine Media
A model of a Stirling engine showing its simplicity. Unlike the steam engine or internal combustion engine, it has no valves or timing train. The heat source (not shown) would be placed under the brass cylinder.
Illustration from Robert Stirling's 1816 patent application of the air engine design that later came to be known as the Stirling Engine
A typical late nineteenth/early twentieth-century water-pumping engine by the Rider-Ericsson Engine Company
Philips MP1002CA Stirling generator of 1951
Stirling engine running.
A pressure/volume graph of the idealized Stirling cycle.
Point focus parabolic mirror with Stirling engine at its centre and its solar tracker at Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA) in Spain.
Top view of two rotating displacers powering the horizontal piston. Regenerators and radiator removed for clarity
Various free-piston Stirling configurations... F. "free cylinder", G. Fluidyne, H. "double-acting" Stirling (typically 4 cylinders).
Video showing the compressor and displacer of a very small Stirling Engine in action
Video of a bench top stirling engine demonstrating the speed and power.
