Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Hi all, for the past week during the lockdown period I have been working on developing stirling engine fan product. The fan is completely in house designed, done computational fluid dynamics analysis to predict the airflow pattern and air velocity from fan when it runs at particular rotational speed. Its been a fun week and still the product needs base stand and few things. This is till under development stage for now.

---

• The following video is the alpha testing of engine
• Making the product suitable for general public as well
• In the video you can see how the engine slowly accelerates as the heat increases. In between I also tried adding water at cold junction to check the heat transfer response. It was interesting
• Engine start time was about 30 to 40 sec of heating. Reached a max speed of 310 rpm.
• Six blade fan

---

You probably designed your engine far better than I could. Are you thinking of selling kits?


I found Stirling engines to be sensitive in the heat gathering and heat shedding ratio.

The heat shedding capability needs to be greater than the heat gathering.
Which isn't easy as the heat input can be generously applied but cooling is generally harder.

Thank you.. Yes planning to sell these as assembly kits..
Yes correct, generally I will expose the cold junction to atmosphere but this time I tried with water at room temp and water at less than 15 deg C. The results were surprising, sudden acceleration in rotational speed. planning to perform a conduction/convection analysis to see which cooling method best suited but this is future plan might not be needed now.