Thermoacoustic Phenomena and Stirling Engines

—New Concepts for Understanding Heat Engines—

Abstract

About 30 years ago, Ceperley proposed “a pistonless Stirling engine”, which became sufficient motivation for thermoacousticians to regard thermoacoustic phenomena as a kind of heat engine. Since then work flux, heat flux, and their mutual conversion have been suggested to be fundamental ideas for understanding thermoacoustic engines. Such new concepts can be equally applicable to some reciprocating heat engines. In this paper, based on experimental results, I discuss the working mechanism of Stirling engines from the standpoint of a thermoacoustics framework.