Abstract
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis is one of the most important powerful processes in commercial engine project, which is going to give the engineers the overall vision that a simulator may want to know about. It could save lots of time and costs before people actually manufacture the engine. This paper deals with numerical simulation of a double acting alpha-type Stirling engine (DASE), which has four cylinders with four pistons moving respectively. In the engine, double actions of the four pistons take place in two opposite chambers in each of four cylinders. For each cycle, the piston alternately moves backand- forth in a cylinder by the connecting expansion chamber of a cylinder to the compression chamber of the next cylinder with a channel, the pressure difference between the expansion and compression chambers is increased and the power capacity of the engine is improved. In this paper, the numerical module is built based on the frame of commercial CFD software (FLUENT). The user-defined functions (UDFs) of the software are adapted so that the movement of those pistons in those cylinders can be simulated. Periodic changes in temperature, pressure and velocity fields in the engine are predicted and the power output of engine is obtained.
Highlights
The idea of double acting alpha-type Stirling engine which original created with four cylinders but in one cylinder have two chambers, expansion room and compression room
Each cylinder has only one piston which can move from the top dead center (TDC) point to bottom dead center (BDC) point to create the swept volume in other room
The control volume (CV) design includes hot chamber, cold chamber, and regenerator and pipes, which are the exact fluids occupied by the volumes inside the engine
Summary
The idea of double acting alpha-type Stirling engine which original created with four cylinders but in one cylinder have two chambers, expansion room (hot space) and compression room (cold space). The adjacent cylinders would be connected to the behind cylinders after throughout the regenerators. The four pistons can be driven by apply any mechanism systems, whichever can make the sinusoidal motions of multi-pistons by the phase angle differences of adjacent pistons in the engine, for example the crankshaft system and swash-plate system...etc. The models are designed with the exact fluids occupied by the volumes inside the engine. The primer design has 4 modules within hot chamber (fluid in the expansion chamber), cold chamber (fluid in the compression chamber), and regenerator (fluid in the regenerator) and pipes (fluid occupied in the pipes which connected hot chamber and cold chamber to regenerator). Two modules are at the smallest volume (pressing) and two other modules are at the biggest volume (stretching)
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