I guess I have a bit of an obsession with heat engines running on ice.
I got interested in Flame licker, vacuum, or atmospheric engines, variously called, several years ago while researching Stirling and heat engines generally.
The flame licker is interesting in that,in principle of operation, it is kind of the opposite of a Stirling. Power is derived, not from expanding hot air pushing a piston out due to increased pressure, but rather from the vacuum created by the cooling and contraction of hot air which draws the piston in. Or looked at another way, atmospheric pressure pushes the piston in.
So, it looks to me like a flame-licker is actually just a cooling chamber.
What if, instead of adding heat or flame to draw hot air into the chamber, we were to draw in "hot" ambient air? The "sink" or cooling chamber of the engine being packed, (surrounded by) ice, dry ice, or even liquid nitrogen or something to make it much colder than ambient
Just another proposal for an experiment sometime.