Executive Summary

Powering our future will require replacing many of our current technologies, transforming the
largest energy industries, and adopting stricter environmental policies for regulating carbon
emissions. Engineers are providing economically and environmentally sustainable solutions
to the energy problem that involve using renewable sources of energy, such as solar energy,
for means of power generation. The purpose of this project was to develop a power plant
module that was low-cost, consumer-scale, and environmentally friendly. The objective was
to modify a two-cylinder auto air compression engine into an alpha-configured Stirling
engine that operates using solar energy as the input thermal source.

A Stirling engine can be classified as a closed-cycle regenerative

thermodynamic system that operates by cyclic compression and expansion of a working fluid
at different temperatures. There are three primary configurations for a Stirling engine: the
alpha, the beta, and gamma configuration. The alpha-configured Stirling engine consists of
two cylinders – a hot cylinder and a cold cylinder – connected by a regenerator or mass
transfer tube. Each of the cylinders contains a power piston connected to the crankshaft. The
hot cylinder remains in contact with an external heat source and is maintained at high
temperature. The cold cylinder, on the other hand, is maintained at low temperatures by
rejecting heat through a heat exchanger. The working fluid undergoes expansion in the hot
cylinder and is subsequently compressed in the cold cylinder. The work required to compress
the fluid in the cold cylinder is less than that produced by expansion in the hot cylinder,
resulting in a net positive work output. The Stirling cycle will continue as long as the
temperature differential between the cylinders creates sufficient energy to overcome the
internal friction of the engine. For the purposes of this project, an alpha-type Stirling engine
was chosen using solar energy as the heating source.