Design Fabrication and Performance Analysis of Stirling Engine

Abstract

Under the assumption that the rate of population growth is constant and the consumption rate of energy is same as to date, then the energy reservoir will vanish within 320 years. We have to think about an engine, which is working under fixed quantity of working medium (air or inert gas) and heat energy from the any resource (solar, coal, bio fuel etc., but not petrol or diesel). This is what we are going to achieve by this work by fabricating a stirling engine, which is actually an external combustion engine working under a fixed quantity of air as a working medium. Studies were already conducted on this type of engine by changing various heating (solar, bio fuel etc.,) and cooling methods, but, to the best of our knowledge nobody were conducted its performance by varying the displacer length. Our project involves the design and fabrication of a stirling engine model and its detailed performance analysis with respect to the length of displacer. Displacer is an important part in the stirling engine with direct the working medium from the hot end to cold end or vice versa. Changing the dimension of the displacer will change the volume available in the working cylinder and hence changes the available quantity of the working medium. Accurate study is essential to have an idea about the performance under this varying condition of the displacer. In this work, we constructed a model of the stirling engine from a design in which had a provision to adjust the displacer length. After conducting the test, it found that, the displacer dimension severely effecting the performance. The optimum length found to be in between 35 mm and 40 mm for the model analyzed.