Study on Heat Transfer of Heat Exchangers in the Stirling Engine : Performance of Heat Exchangers in the Test Stirling Engine

The heat transfer performance of the actual heat exchangers obtained from the experimental results of the test Stirling engine is presented. The heater for the test engine has 120 heat transfer tubes that consist of a bare-tube part and a fin-tube part. These tubes are located around the combustion chamber and heated by the combustion gas. The cooler is the shell-and-tube-type heat exchanger and is chilled by water. It is shown that the experimental results of heat transfer performance of the heater and cooler of the test Stirling engine are in good agreement with the results calculated by the correlation proposed in our previous heat transfer study under the periodically reversing flow condition. Our correlation is thus confirmed to be applicable to the evaluation of the heat transfer coefficient and the thermal design of the heat exchangers in the Stirling engine.