how do you model a stirling engine

Hello, Im a mechanical student and im just learning matlab/simulink. I have a stirling engine project that i need to use simulink or matlab on to analyze the performance of the engine.

Basicly, i want to be able to input the following:

• Maximum temperature: 500K
• Hot piston intial position: 20mm away from the refrenece point.

The engine has the following components, it being an alpha engine:

• a hot cylinder
• a hot piston
• a cold finned cylinder
• a cold piston
• a heat exchanger regenrator that connects the cylinders
• a crankshaf that connects the pistons
• a flywheel that connects to the crankshaft
• a generator that convertys the torqu to power

from the system im building, i want the follwoing outputs:

• temperatures inside: hot cylinder, cold cylinder, regenerator
• Pressure inside: hot cylinder, cold cylinder, regenerator
• Volume of air inside: hot cylinder, cold cylinder, regenerator
• Frequency of: hot and cold pistons
• Torue of the flywheel
• power generated
• position of hot and cold piston

The stirling engine follows a stirling cycle, where if the hot cylinder is under full expansion, the cold cylinder is in parial expansion moving in the direction of full expansion. And vice versa.

I have created the engine in solidworks and have it fully assembly. I was able to use simmechanics to import it and animate it. But im not sure how to go from there to creating a system that reciecves those inputs.

Thigs i found difficult are:

• how to combine the pistion position to the area to be used in the heat transfer equation.
• how to relate the hot pistion movement to the cold piston movement
• how to generally create block systems.

please help me im in dire need, i spent the past 2 days trying to do it.

[Naman Bhaia]

Hello Amna,

Can you please share what you have tried so the people in the community have a starting point to help you?

[Fernando Gonzalez]

Hi I study mechanical too and I have the exact same project, I need to generate some graphs with those values and make a detailed analysis of it, do you have any information of how to do this matlab?

I hope you can help me, mi teachers don't help to much.

[Jacob Billingham]

bump

Answer 1

[Steve Miller]

You can see a Stirling Engine example in Simscape here: Gamma Stirling Engine

https://www.mathworks.com/help/simscape/ug/gamma-stirling-engine.html

--Steve