Electronic Stirling engine

Les Kerr in Australia designed this Stirling engine in which the displacer is moved by a stepper motor. This technology allows the engine to be close coupled solving the dead space problem. Superior performance is obtained by altering the phase between the power piston and the displacer while the engine is running. It should also be possible to make the engine self starting.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Stirling
• engine
• hot
• air
• stepper
• motor
• control
• self
• starting

[electrique527]

Very well done, and a very clever idea!

Does the stepper motor ever skip a step, maybe at high speed?

Richard

[modelengineermedia]

Initially I connected the stepper directly to the displacer and found that the motor stalled when its RPM exceeded the max revs of the stepper. This was solved by the 2 to 1 ratio gears that reduced the stepper speed to half. It now is stable and will run for hours. To make the stepper run at high revs I fed it with a constant current source driver.

Les Kerr

[OleTC]

This is absolutely elegant. Should be straightforward to make a diagram for preferred phaseangle related to temperature and revs. Then some feedback from probes and - well You have written it Yourself.

Great job!

[modelengineermedia]

Thanks for your encouragement. At this stage the electronics is only receiving data from the shaft encoder on the power piston

regards

les Kerr

[HFGFGBDBDB]

Electronic ?

[modelengineermedia]

The movement of the power piston is sensed by a shaft encoder which is fed to and analysed by the electronics. This then feeds the stepper motor with the correct number of pulses to keep the engine running at max performance

[olidz]

nice song ... tectonik ?

[coolbluelights]

remove the video and re-upload it

[RickMHobson]

Does the stepper motor take more power to run than the small sterling engine can produce? I can see this being very useful on larger sterling engines though.

[boharihamen]

If i am not wrong, that Big stepper motor is a HP printer stepper motor, part number is PM55*****. Quite powerful for its size and produces significant power just using my hand to turn it.

Any schematics for this engine?

[macrumpton]

This is a really interesting idea. I wonder if you could also just have a solenoid drive the displacer, and have the activating switch be mechanically triggered by the piston position.

[kowdie12]

so r u feeding it power manually? or does it read from the encoder on the power piston to tell the stepper what to do?

[piespokladowy]

*****

[BlueDragon4484]

so...... heat to electricity?

Cool

[mikeg642000]

Is it possible to vary the speed of the engine?

[macrumpton]

Perhaps if you tried to change the movie format to AVI or something other than what you are using before uploading it might stop that noise problem.

[sonyxploder]

Might want to reupload the video. The audio is buggered up on your clip.

[cdallacosta]

nice but there's no need of a stepper motor to change phase... differential gearing anyone?