Stirlingengineforum.com

After one year with a lot of breaks and delays finally I got my 2nd DIY project finished. Again it is a LTD gamma engine that runs on a cup of hot water. And again it is made of parts, that you can find in every household. But now it looks much better than the first one (the first one was quite ugly). The used parts are:
* plastic bottle
* several lids of plastic bottles
* lids of gherkin glasses
* ballon
* CD or DVD
* one roulade pin made of stainless steel
* copper wire
* some glas perls
* thick (50µm) aluminium foil (I have tried to implement some kind of regenerator around the displacer plate)
* ... I will write a tutorial how to build this engine and post it here in this topic.

Currently the temperature difference is at least 30 Kelvin. I have started the engine with a cup of boiling water and after the engine stopped running, I have measured a water temperature of 57°C, the ambient temperature was 27°C. Maybe it would be possible to decrease this value with some tweaking - I supect, that the compression ratio is much too large for lower temperature differences.
I was hoping to reach a delta of less than 20 Kelvin, so I am not completely satisfied with the result. But at least it seems to produce some appreciable torque with boiling water, so I am going to try to measure the output later.

And of course I have posted a video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JoUVGuIL7k :)

regards
Soeren

That's a really nice engine. It's inspired me to make one along the same lines, can you tell me what you made the displacer out of ?

@Junkie: the displacer is made of polystyrene foam.

As promised I have uploaded a detailed description with pictures how to build this engine: http://home.arcor.de/soeren_scharf/Stir ... torial.zip

I think, that the lids of the gherkin glasses are not a good choise, because they are coated with plastic, so heat transfer might be poor. Maybe you would get better results with lids from a cream jar.

regards
Soeren

Your design looks good. You have done well to add the glass bead bearings and put some spring in your connecting rods. It took me a long time to figure out those tricks.

Jim
http://StirlingBuilder.com

Thanks for the plans really helpful. You should post them on a website like instructables

I will be having a go at building this sometime.

One thing though, I had to rename all of your image files from upper case to lower case to get them to load in the html, could be because I'm using Linux though.