Archive for the ‘Engine 3F’ Category
Thursday, February 9th, 2012
One of the more difficult yet critical issues in designing your first Stirling engine is deciding on the correct power piston displacement. My earlier discussion of power piston sizing did not satisfy a lot of people. So I'm going to make this one very simple to apply. For me to ...
Posted in Analysis Tools, Engine 3D, Engine 3F | No Comments »
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
First let me say I will display this engine and generator at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA on May 21, 22 so you can see it running if you are there.
The above video shows a one-watt Stirling engine driving a one-watt LED. Conversion efficiency is not too ...
Posted in Engine 3F, Generators and motors, Performance testing | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Rev 1: See details at bottom.
Let me summarize what has been covered and what remains in this efficiency analysis:
Component
Power
percentage of total power
Efficiency analysis
Heat lost directly to the environment
40.3w
58.4%
Part 1
...
Posted in Analysis Tools, Engine 3F, Performance testing, Thermodynamics | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Let me summarize what has been covered and what remains in this efficiency analysis:
Component
Power
percentage of total power
Efficiency analysis
Heat lost directly to the environment
40.3w
58.4%
Part 1
Thermal shorting: heat conduction directly from the hot end to the cold end
5.9w
8.6%
Part ...
Posted in Analysis Tools, Engine 3F | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
Continuing with the analysis of where the input power (heat) to the engine goes, the next item to consider is the conduction loss often referred to as thermal shorting.
Conduction losses
A Stirling engine of gamma configuration, such as the one being considered, uses a displacer to shuttle ...
Posted in Analysis Tools, Engine 3F, Heat Transfer, Thermodynamics | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
In an earlier post I measured 1.05 watts output from my engine 3F using a 69 watt input. This computes to 1.5% efficiency. So where did the other 68 watts go? The following is my analysis of where all the energy went. It won’t be as rigorous as I would ...
Posted in Analysis Tools, Engine 3F, Heat Transfer | 6 Comments »
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010
The following is a transcript with still photos of the previous video on the same subject. I’ve included a few more notes about the engine, my model 3F.
This is a gamma configuration Stirling engine. I’m powering it with the heat from a 70 watt light bulb so that I ...
Posted in Engine 3F, Performance testing | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
In the world of small Stirling engines everyone seems to talk about power and efficiency—but you seldom see the facts and the data. Just a couple days ago I saw the following Stirling engine on Youtube:
The promoter claims it must be putting out 100 to 150 watts. It was ...
Posted in Engine 3F, Performance testing | 3 Comments »
