Heat Transfer Enhancement in Stirling Engines Using Fins with Different Configurations

Stirling engine, that was presented in 1816 changed the world since due to its enormous advantage over steam engines, popular in that era. A Stirling engine is a device which converts temperature difference into mechanical work. Hence, maximizing the temperature difference between the hot and the cold end of the cylinder would help a great deal in increasing the engine’s performance. The most viable means of obtaining that would be through the addition of fins of the surface of the cold section. This should enable in the heat transfer enhancement in the cold end due to the increase in the surface area. The principal motive of this paper is to conduct a simulation study on a Stirling engine with and without fins using ANSYS (Workbench) 2021 R1. Fins of different geometries and thicknesses will be studied as well to find the best suited fin in practice. Manual calculations are performed as well, in order to validate the results obtained via ANSYS. The results obtained indicate that the best Stirling engine performance can be achieved by the incorporation of rectangular fins in the geometry. The results obtained and the conclusion drawn was in-line with the previous research on the subject.