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Stove Fans and Stirling Engines

Regenerator Boosts Stirling Engine Performance

August, 08, 2017, By admin | Leave a reply

The regenerator is a critical component which is located inside the displacer cylinder. The location of the displacer and regenerator is shown in figure 1. This ‘critical component’ obtains heat from the hot air and releases heat to the cold air, thus recycling the energy internally, allowing the Stirling engine to achieve higher efficiency.

Fig. 1 Warpfive Stirling engine

The regenerator is also known as “the critical component” within the Stirling engine cycle. Currently, they are usually made of woven screens or random fibres. A woven screen structure has relatively high flow friction, and also requires long assembly times that are costly. Random fibre structures also have high flow friction but are easy to fabricate and are therefore much less expensive to manufacture. It is for this reason that Warpfive Stove Fansuse random fibre stainless steel regenerators. See figure 2 for a close up of a random fibre matrix.

Fig. 2 Electron Micrography of a random fibre regenerator matrix (Courtesy of NASA Glenn Research Centre)


Mounir B. Ibrahim & Roy C. Tew, Jr (2012) Stirling Convertor Regenerators