Stirling Heat Engine Generator ECE 445 – Senior Design Design Review

In order for the constantly increasing demand for electricity to be met, while preserving our natural resources as well as the earth as a whole, more efficient and alternative energy sources must be utilized. However, it is difficult to integrate alternative energy sources due to their need characteristic of remoteness (ie the best wind resources are often located in remote areas far from current load centers). For an alternative energy source to be desired it must be both economical and have the ability to retrofit with existing types of generation facilities; thus making it marketable. For this reason our group will design and build a stirling heat engine generator. The stirling engine has been around since 1816, however, not widely used. Engineers are beginning to incorporate the stirling engine into power applications, but they are still rare to come by. Our design will illustrate that these external combustion engines are efficient, safe, low cost and easy to operate, thus making them very plausible for the future of energy generation. Objectives: The purpose of this project is to effectively (and efficiently) convert thermal energy into electrical energy via a stirling heat engine. The stirling engine has several advantages over conventional heat engines (such as the steam turbine). First, the stirling engine can achieve the highest efficiency of any heat engine and perform “theoretically ” up to the full Carnot efficiency. Furthermore, the stirling engine is not limited to any one specific heat source. As a result, the stirling engine-generator setup can be retrofit with all existing heat engine-generator type power plants, utilized as a stand alone renewable energy system (running off of solar heat) or be used in combined heat and power applications which convert industrial waste heat into electrical energy. The stirling heat engine generator system will output a 120Vac, 60Hz signal that will be able to provide a continuous 10W of power. This configuration represents a per-phase equivalent of the three-phase generation system. Thus, it will be easy to scale up our results for single-phase residential (integrated or stand alone) alternative energy system, or three-phase utility generation