The Low Temperature Stirling Engine is undoubtedly one of the greatest machines ever devised by the human mind. Although it differs quite a lot from the original stirling engine designed by Robert stirling almost 200 years ago, it still works on similar principles and a LOT less energy. You can view the LTD Stirling engine available to purchase here.

The Low Temperature Differential Stirling Engine works on the gentle movement of air inside a chamber, from a cold part of the engine, back to a hot part, back to the cold part and so on and so on. I won’t bore you with the details,if you would like to know how a Low Temperature Differential Stirling Engine works in detail watch this video, otherwise, skip past it an continue reading below about the invention of LTD Stirling Engine -

The Invention of The Low Temperature Differential Stirling Engine

As i mentioned already, the original Stirling Engine was invented by Reverend Robert Stirling of Scotland in 1816. This engine was large and cumbersome but an ingenious machine nonetheless. Its invention was required as metalworking methods at the time usually meant that a lot of substandard iron was being produced, as a result a lot of men were killed by exploding boilers from steam engines at the time. There were many people trying to find a way to create an engine that operated on much lower pressures and therefore would not injure the men working on them.

The man with the solution was Reverend Robert Stirling. Anyway, back to our Low Temperature model. The Ltd Stirling Engine was only developed in the 1980s by Ivo Kolin, who was a professor in the University of Zagreb. His work was them improved by a Mathematician at the University of Wisconsin by the name of  Dr James Senft. Dr Senft and several others designed and built the first true Low temperature Differential Stirling engine, which they called the MM-1.Since that time there have only been a handful of companies with the skill and expertise capable of manufacturing these incredible little machines.

You can see the full page of Low Temperature Stirling Engine available to buy here.

The original MM1 can be ought from Amazon here.

low temperature stirling engine - mm1 stirling engine

Low Temperature Differential Stirling Engine Uses

The reason why we do not see many stirling engines in our everyday lives is quite simple – although they run on very low temperature difference, they need to be very large to output anywhere near the power that a typical four stroke internal combustion engine would. You can find them in some places though. The military uses them for applications where the quite and smooth operation of the ltd stirling engine would be required, such as in submarines. They are also beginning to make there way into our PCs. A company called MSI recently built a micro ltd stirling engine that runs on the heat produced by a PCs CPU – the engine uses up the heat produced by the CPU and dissipates it. Whether these will replace the heat sinks which are normally used remains to be seen. Then of course there is the practical and teaching side of the ltd stirling engine – it can be used to show students many of the laws of Physics, from Boyles law to basic mechanical engineering principles.

Low Temperature Stirling Engines in the future?

With ever increasing energy prices and the constant threat of global warming looming it is likely that the LTD stirling engine will have some role to play in the future. I do not know what this role is but i’m sure that out there somewhere a mechanical engineering whizz kid of theoretical physicist is working on improving the efficiency of the stirling engine even further, or maybe even inventing a new design that is better than all the previous ones.

You can see the full page of Low Temperature Stirling Engine available to buy here.