Stirling Engines: An Overview and Commercial Status

by Stephen Welty 5-July-2010

Despite having been around since 1816 when Robert Stirling was granted the first patent on the
technology, Stirling technology never was taken up by mainstream manufacturers as they preferred
internal combustion engines and steam engines as their prime movers. The Stirling Engine was
invented as a solution to the problem of safety with pressure vessels in steam engines. In Scotland
in the early 1800's there were a number of accidents involving steam engine pressure vessels and
Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, found a way to convert heat to mechanical power using air at
mean ambient pressure rather than steam at elevated pressures. With improvements in materials
and manufacturing processes, the steam engine technology remained viable and its safety and
reliability performance improved. This was a positive development for the industrial revolution but
it left the Stirling Engine as a laboratory curiosity for centuries to come.

Ironically, modern day Stirling Engines must operate at mean pressures in excess of 20 bar to
achieve power to weight ratios that make them viable in most applications. While the original
problem the Stirling Engine was meant to solve has been solved by materials science and
manufacturing techniques, society has a series of new problems that the Stirling Engine is ideally
suited to help solve including the following: excessive or irrational fossil fuel consumption and its
global consequences, ageing electricity generation infrastructure and insufficient power
transmission infrastructure.

The Stirling Cycle

The simple four discrete step description of the Stirling cycle in Thermodynamic text books is
relatively easy to understand. However, when one considers that the pistons movement is
sinusoidal instead of the square wave of the ideal process and that oscillating fluid flow occurs
during the process and the fact that all four process happen 40 to 100 times per second (depending
on the design frequency of the machine), it is no longer so simple.

Most of the areas of speciality within mechanical engineering have been required to understand and
improve the operation of the machines. For example, the unique dry running of pistons in helium,
hydrogen or nitrogen environments requires understanding of tribology. This is especially the case
for some Free Piston Stirling Engines (FPSE) that are hermetically sealed and are required to run in
excess of 30000 hours without failure. As another example, fluid dynamics has contributed
substantially to the design of practical regenerators and heat exchangers to operate in this unique
environment. The list of specialities goes on including vibrations, heat transfer, pressure vessel
design, dynamics and even spills over considerably into other engineering disciplines for alternator
design, controls design and materials science to name a few.

Since Stirling Engines generate power while taking energy from a reservoir of high quality heat and
dumping low quality heat to a sink of considerably lower temperature than the reservoir, the
applications for it are numerous. Anywhere there is a heat source with a temperature of at least
100C higher than the ambient it is possible to use a Stirling Engine to generate mechanical power.
Although such low temperature differentials are possible, they may not be practical depending on
the efficiency, cost, weight and size requirements. Microgen Engine Corporations' 1kW engine runs
at 525C with heat reject temperatures as high as 70C while the Solar Dish Stirling systems
sometimes run with temperatures in excess of 700C.

The power output of a Stirling engine can be conceptualized using the pressure-volume (PV)
diagram of the cycle which in many ways is similar to the PV diagram of the Otto and Diesel cycles
with the main differences being at the heat input and output parts of the cycle. The Otto cycle uses
combustion for constant volume heat addition and exhaust as constant volume heat rejection. The
Stirling cycle is a closed cycle so must add heat to the same gas it later removes it from during the
constant volume heat reject step. This puts considerable demand on heat exchangers and a heat
storage device called a regenerator between the compression and expansion spaces.

The efficiency with which the engine can convert heat energy to mechanical energy can best be
understood by using the Carnot cycle to determine the maximum theoretical efficiency of heat
engines. Carnots' theory explains mathematically that the higher the temperature difference
between heat source and sink, the greater the efficiency. Modern day Stirling Engines have been
demonstrated to achieve on the order of 50% of the ideal Carnot efficiency at 500C temperature
difference.

Applications of the Stirling Engine

Some of the practical applications for Stirling Engines include the following: Solar Thermal,
MicroCHP, Auxiliary Power Units (APU) and Industrial Exhaust heat recovery to name a few. For
solar thermal applications, the solar rays have to be concentrated to achieve higher temperatures and
this is done using parabolic troughs or parabolic dishes. Stirling Energy Systems use parabolic
dishes for their high temperature utility scale power plants while Cool Energy proposes the use
parabolic troughs for lower temperature requirements in their domestic concept. The parabolic
trough transfers the solar rays to an intermediate fluid in evacuated tubes while the solar dish
reflects the solar rays directly onto the engine heat receiver allowing higher temperatures, greater
power density and higher efficiency.

The application where the Stirling Engine has been proven to the greatest extent is in domestic
MicroCHP (micro - combined heat and power) using natural gas. Thousands of units have been
built and trialled in Europe as a replacement product for boilers in residential properties. The
primary means of heating residential dwellings in Europe is by means of heating water in a boiler
and then pumping it around to radiators in the different rooms. This differs from the most common
heating technique in the US where air is heated and ducted around the home in forced air systems.
The pumped water heating systems are able to take advantage of the waste heat from the engine
since the same fluid in the boiler/radiator system is also the engine cooling water.

Since the MicroCHP application is a heat led product, electric energy is produced when heat
demand exists for heating water or the home. Since the engine only runs when there is a demand
for its waste heat, the engines can be said to operate at near 100% efficiency or 100% utilization of
the primary energy (minus heat losses out the flue which are low for modern condensing boilers).
This compares to approximately 50% efficient power plants which then have to transmit power
through the grid where more energy is lost. So the MicroCHP products are in effect doubling the
efficiency of use of the fuel energy compared to the conventional fossil fuel generating plants and at
the same time they are also decreasing the load on the transmission infrastructure. These heat led
products have considerable potential for reducing fossil fuel usage and carbon emissions in cold
climates as well as reducing demand on electric generation and transmission infrastructure.

The APU applications are numerous ranging from trucks to caravans and even to marine
applications on yachts or larger vessels. APUs already exist based on internal combustion (IC)
engines but there are a number of strengths that Stirling Engines have compared to IC engines
including lower maintenance requirements, lower noise and they are scalable down to lower power
outputs rather than the multi kW capability of IC engines. However, any APUs requiring more than
4kW are most likely best left in the domain of IC engines because of the considerably lower power
to weight ratio of IC engines. This is the same reason why Stirling Engines are not at the moment
the best choice for transportation applications – although this could change with future
developments.

Stirling Engines can be used in both the APU and the MicroCHP applications with any fuel. Most
experience to date is with natural gas but LPG, diesel and biomass heat sources have also been used
to run Stirling Engines with success.

Different Configurations and Sizes

The types of Stirling Engines designs are numerous but can be classified into two broad categories;
Kinematic and Free Piston. The Kinematic design is the classic design invented in the early 1800s
and involved a crank shaft translating the reciprocating motion of the piston into rotational
movement. The Free Piston design is a more recent innovation since the 1970's developed
independently by Stirling Technology Company in Washington State and Sunpower in Ohio.

The piston in a Stirling Engine must run practically dry to avoid the risk of blocking up the small
spaces in the heat exchangers and regenerator with lubricant. This requirement combined with a
crank shaft design allows for considerable side loads and therefore piston/cylinder wear. The Free
Piston design solves this problem by minimizing side loads and in some cases using gas bearings or
flexure bearings which can result in thousands of hours with virtually no wear down of components.
These characteristics lead to the possibility of hermetically sealing an engine for life with no
maintenance requirements.

Stirling Engines can be further classified into three configurations as subsets of the Kinematic and
Free Piston variants. This subset of classification has to do with the arrangement of the piston that
transfers the pressure wave energy to mechanical power relative to the displacer that displaces gas
creating the pressure wave. In the beta configuration, both the piston and displacer reciprocate in
the same cylinder. In the gamma configuration, the pistons and displacer reciprocate in separate
cylinders. Finally in the alpha configuration, there are two or more pistons that in turn provide both
displacement and energy conversion functions and there is no separate displacer to displace gas.

It is not clear at the moment which configuration offers the most advantages and there are many
different configurations being developed by different companies. It is likely that as the technology
matures, some configurations may emerge as more dominant than others for specific applications in
the same way the three blade wind turbine emerged as dominant over its alternatives.

Commercial Status of Stirling Engines

There has been considerable interest in the use of Stirling Engines for MicroCHP in Europe over the
last 10 years. There are products on the market or near market readiness from companies such as
Whisper Tech with a kinematic alpha design to Enatec, Remeha and Baxi with Free Piston beta
designs. There have been numerous field trials over the last ten years to hone the technology and
understand its carbon saving potential and pay back period for end consumers in MicroCHP
applications. Considerable interest has been generated from governments and with increased feed
in tariffs, the pay back period for the technology could be as low as three years.

Since these engines are manufactured with proven automotive manufacturing techniques (pressing,
stamping, casting, molding, brazing, welding and machining) it is easy to imagine scaling up
production to large volumes with proper quality control. This is also an opportunity to fill idle
automotive factories with workers already skilled in the manufacturing techniques required.