Commercial use to extract more power from IC engine

[eric.sommer]

Good morning:

I am in the process of designing a new concept engine and ran across
this website. I've looked at Stirling before, but gave it up as a
technical challenge out of my budget.

BUT

It has an application as the consumer of waste heat from an internal
combusion engine.

Given an IC engine, running at 800 degree C exhaust gas temp, and
using that heat to drive the hot side of the Stirling. Using inbound
airflow on its way into the ic engine, cooling fins would run
anywhere from -40 C to +50 C. Regnerators would be used.

Further, given that there is space to mount between 4 and 8 Stirling
pairs PER SIDE (8 - 16 in total) - dependant on size of cylinders and
that the airflow past the cooling fins will be in the region of 1000
to 3000 (cubic) litres per minute.

Helium is the target medium in the Stirling engine (hydrogen just to
risky - especially sitting next to an IC engine!)

Using the above, what would be the theoritical and the probable power
output of the Stirling engine?

I've searched high and low and been unable to find any sort of data
which would give an approximate answer given the bore, stroke and
temperature differential available.

The idea is to first build a stationary IC engine of my new concept,
(which has a drastically higher thermal efficiency - projected in the
region of 60 - 70%) and to use the Stirling to cool the exhaust (and
extract more power) before feeding the exhaust into a further
particle/moisture trap to reduce emissions to practically nothing.

The concept is ideally suited to driving electical generators and
hydraulic constant pressure systems.

Any ideas on power output? Where I can find a formula to get a sort
of idea?

Cheers

Eric

[stan.hornbaker]

I would suggest that the viability of the Enhanced ICE be first confirmed and then look into the details of Parasitic Stirling Engines to improve overall performance.

As mentioned frequently on these forums, the Stirling engine is deceivingly simple and is actually rather complex. The best possible conversion of heat to output is limited first by the Carnot eff. and second by low heat transfer factors, gas to metal to gas on both the heat source and heat sink sides.

The next step would be to either learn more Stirling theory and application of it or to locate an expert for further advice.

Hopefully such an expert will come by shortly.