Thermal/fluid characteristics of the inline stacked plain‐weave screen as solar‐powered Stirling engine heat regenerators

Abstract

Abstract The present work demonstrates the results of a 3D numerical analysis of heat transfer and fluid flow through a fabricated aluminium wire filament, bonded mesh deployed as a regenerator surface in the Stirling engine. Here, two inline regenerator models with the same mass but different geometry were simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element method (FEM). The results show that the temperature efficiency of both inline with non‐uniform and uniform wire diameters is almost equal. However, the non‐uniform diameter model is shorter and reaches the maximum thermal efficiency faster in reduced length <18$ < 18$. Also, it shows approximately 5% a greater mean thermal efficiency. In general, from this simulation, it can be seen that changes in the geometry of the heat regenerator can have a direct effect on thermal efficiency and pressure drop in the same mass. Therefore, using the inline stacked plain‐weave screen with a non‐uniform wire diameter regenerator in the powered Stirling engine is recommended due to space constraints. Small changes in the regenerator geometry lead to immense leaps in increasing a solar power plant's overall efficiency.