Six-cylinder Stirling engine

Описание: This, finally, is my 6-cylinder engine that's been in the works for over a year and that has morphed several times into what you see now. It has 6 working cylinders but only 3 shared power pistons positioned 120 degrees apart on the crankshaft. The power pistons are made of PVC fittings and shock absorber dust boots, the cylinders are from stainless steel water bottles, the crank is 3/16" plated steel rod, and there are 13 ball bearings on the crank. I used 1.5" stroke for both displacers and pistons. The cylinders and displacers are identical to those I use on my smaller engines, with stainless steel wool for the displacer material and expanded steel mesh from old car air filters for the spiral support mesh and end disks. The water jacket is made from a piece of old motorcycle inner tube cut to fit snugly over the cylinders and capped on the ends. Water flows through it from one end to the other. The heat shroud is a piece of aluminum gutter.

As you can see in the video, the engine is pretty quiet although there is still some tweaking to be done. When running on alcohol I can't stop the crankshaft by hand, I have to grab the pulley or flywheel to stop it. You can see that when the engine is just barely turning it still runs very smoothly because of the 3 pistons.

This thing has been a lot of work to build but it's fairly powerful (power output not yet measured) and a lot of fun to run!