Around The World By Stirling Engine

"Everyone needs power. Merrick Lockwood wants to use stirling engines to make that power. This book tells how Mr. Lockwood and his team, spent several years developing a simple, low tech, 5-HP Stirling engine in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It's the story of what worked then and what didn't along with Mr. lockwood's advice on which approaches would work well today. Lockwood's team built a Stirling engine that could burn agricultural garbage (in this case rice husks), however different burners could be designed today to burn previously wasted fuels. Lockwood shows how he used the simple ideas from historic Stirling engines along with his team's innovations to make his engines work. This book is filled with detailed descriptions of Mr. Lookwood's engines along with 34 pages of drawings that have survived. The book includes 184 photographs that show the tools, and methods of fabrication that Lookwood used."--Publisher's description.

Some 200 years after the original invention, internal design of a Stirling engine has come to be considered a specialist task, calling for extensive experience and for access to sophisticated computer modelling. The low parts-count of the type is negated by the complexity of the gas processes by which heat is converted to work. Design is perceived as problematic largely because those interactions are neither intuitively evident, nor capable of being made visible by laboratory experiment. There can be little doubt that the situation stands in the way of wider application of this elegant concept. Stirling Cycle Engines re-visits the design challenge, doing so in three stages. Firstly, unrealistic expectations are dispelled: chasing the Carnot efficiency is a guarantee of disappointment, since the Stirling engine has no such pretentions. Secondly, no matter how complex the gas processes, they embody a degree of intrinsic similarity from engine to engine. Suitably exploited, this means that a single computation serves for an infinite number of design conditions. Thirdly, guidelines resulting from the new approach are condensed to high-resolution design charts – nomograms. Appropriately designed, the Stirling engine promises high thermal efficiency, quiet operation and the ability to operate from a wide range of heat sources. Stirling Cycle Engines offers tools for expediting feasibility studies and for easing the task of designing for a novel application. Key features: Expectations are re-set to realistic goals. The formulation throughout highlights what the thermodynamic processes of different engines have in common rather than what distinguishes them. Design by scaling is extended, corroborated, reduced to the use of charts and fully Illustrated. Results of extensive computer modelling are condensed down to high-resolution Nomograms. Worked examples feature throughout. Prime movers (and coolers) operating on the Stirling cycle are of increasing interest to industry, the military (stealth submarines) and space agencies. Stirling Cycle Engines fills a gap in the technical literature and is a comprehensive manual for researchers and practitioners. In particular, it will support effort world-wide to exploit potential for such applications as small-scale CHP (combined heat and power), solar energy conversion and utilization of low-grade heat.

Existing literature focuses on the alleged merits of the Stirling engine. These are indeed latent but, decades on, remain to be fully realised. This is despite the fact that Stirling and other closed-cycle prime-movers offer a contribution to an ultra-low carbon economy. By contrast with solar panels, the initial manufacture of Stirling engines makes no demands on scarce or exotic raw materials. Further, calculating embodied carbon per kWh favours the Stirling engine by a wide margin.However, the reader expecting to find the Stirling engine promoted as a panacea for energy problems may be surprised to find the reverse. Stirling and Thermal-Lag Engines reflects upon the fact that there is more to be gained by approaching its subject as a problem than as a solution. The Achilles heel of the Stirling engine is a low numerical value of specific work, defined as work per cycle per swept volume per unit of charge pressure and conventionally denoted Beale number NB. Measured values remain unimproved since 1818, quantified here for the first time at 2% of the NB of the modern internal combustion engine! The low figure is traced to incomplete utilisation of the working gas. Only a small percentage of the charge gas — if any — is processed through a complete cycle, i.e., between temperature extremes.The book offers ready-made tools including a simplified algorithm for particle trajectory map construction; an author-patented mechanism delivering optimised working-gas distribution; flow and heat transfer data re-acquired in context and an illustrated re-derivation of the academically respected Method of Characteristics which now copes with shock formation and flow-area discontinuities. All formulations are presented in sufficient detail to allow the reader to 'pick up and run' with them using the data offered in the book.The various strands are drawn together in a comprehensively engineered design of an internally focusing solar Stirling engine, presented in a form allowing a reader with access to basic machining facilities to construct one.The sun does not always shine. But neither will the oil always flow. This new title offers an entrée to technology appropriate to the 21st century.

For Stirling engines to enjoy widespread application and acceptance, not only must the fundamental operation of such engines be widely understood, but the requisite analytic tools for the stimulation, design, evaluation and optimization of Stirling engine hardware must be readily available. The purpose of this design manual is to provide an introduction to Stirling cycle heat engines, to organize and identify the available Stirling engine literature, and to identify, organize, evaluate and, in so far as possible, compare non-proprietary Stirling engine design methodologies. This report was originally prepared for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U. S. Department of Energy.

One of the major challenges of the coming century is how to keep our technological world working and still save the environment and mankind. Author Mark Shelton takes readers through fascinating Sunpower, Inc., staffed by engineers testing a solar-powered machine, which may promise to be one of the most important advances the world has ever known.

This book is about the Stirling engine and its development from the heavy cast-iron machine of the nineteenth century into the efficient high-speed engine of today. It is not a handbook: it does not tell the reader how to build a Stirling engine. It is rather the history of a research effort spanning nearly fifty years, together with an outline of principles, some technical details and descriptions of the more important engines. No one will dispute the position of Philips as the pioneer of the modern Stirling engine. Hence the title of the book, hence also the contents, which are confined largely to the Philips work on the subject. Valuable work has been done elsewhere but this is discussed only marginally in order to keep the book within a reasonable size. The book is addressed to a wide audience on an academic level. The first two chapters can be read by the technically interested layman but after that some engineering background and elementary mathematics are generally necessary.Heat engines are traditionally the engineer's route to thermodynamics: in this context, the Stirling engine, which is the simplest of all heat engines, is more suited as a practical example than either the steam engine or the internal-combustion engine. The book is also addressed to historians of technology, from the viewpoint of the twentieth century revival of the Stirling engine as well as its nineteenth century origins.