Stirling cycle engines: inner workings and design

Some 200 years after the original invention, internal design of a Stirling engine has come to be considered a specialist task, calling for extensive experience and for access to sophisticated computer modelling. The low parts-count of the type is negated by the complexity of the gas processes by which heat is converted to work. Design is perceived as problematic largely because those interactions are neither intuitively evident, nor capable of being made visible by laboratory experiment. There can be little doubt that the situation stands in the way of wider application of this elegant conce