Review of Computational Stirling Analysis Methods

Prepared for the Second International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Providence, Rhode Island, August 16–19, 2004. 28 p.Nuclear thermal to electric power conversion carries the promise of longer duration missions and higher scientist data transmission rates back to Earth for a range of missions, including both Mars rovers and deep space missions. A free-piston Stirling convertor is a candidate technology that is considered an ecient and reliable power conversion device for such purposes. While already very ecient, it is believed that better Stirling engines can be developed if the losses inherent in current designs could be better understood. However, they are dicult to instrument and so eorts are underway to simulate a complete Stirling engine numerically. This has only recently been attempted and a review of the methods leading up to and including such computational analysis is presented. And nally it is proposed that the quality and depth of Stirling loss understanding may be improved by utilizing the higherdelity and eciency of recently developed numerical methods. One such method, the Ultra HI-FI technique is presented in detail.