Introduction

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Congratulations on your purchase of American Stirling Company's "Smart Stirling Engine".

The Smart Stirling Engine is intended for engineering, physics, and thermodynamics classes at either the advanced high school or university level.

The engine is electrically heated for accurate power input measurements (which also keeps fumes out of the lab) and is cooled by air or water. It has built-in pressure, temperature, and angular position sensors, and a data acquisition system to allow sensed data to be sent to a Windows PC where it can be plotted and analyzed. A variable voltage DC power supply is available as an option if your lab needs one to power the electrical heating elements.

Stirling engines are heat engines that make exceptionally good teaching tools. Not only does the Stirling Cycle match the Carnot cycle for efficiency, but also real Stirling engines can be made to run on low temperature differences. This ability to run on low temperature differences makes them well suited for use in laboratories.

The Smart Stirling Engines manufactured in the spring of 2008 include new hardware and software features not available in previous versions of this product. Acquired data is now sent to the computer over a USB cable, rather than over a serial cable, which is much more in keeping with today's computers. Data acquisition and analysis software has been written from scratch, and includes many new built-in features, including:

•	automatic generation, display, and evaluation of pressure/volume (P/V) graphs;

•	automatic computation of indicated power using the P/V graphs;

•	a built-in software dynamometer, computing power and torque using the rate at which the engine "spins up" the flywheel;

•	ability to save acquired data both for later re-display and analysis, as well as for transfer to Excel; and

•	ability to compute figures of merit (power, RPM, etc) for a series of experiments, and send the summary to Excel.

•	over-temperature detection and automatic alarm or power shutoff;

•	flywheel angle measured at 16 points, rather than just one

•	more convenient engine layout to facilitate use of water bath

•	quick disconnect water bath drain hose (with integrated valve)

We are proud of the new features which we are providing for you, but also realize that the new software is not as thoroughly field tested as was the older software. Please feel free to contact the author of the software directly if you have questions, problems, comments, or suggestions. Jon Bondy may be reached at jon@jonbondy.com.