Year 10 Engineering: Stirling Engine Homework Assignment

Our Year 10 engineers were set the challenging task of designing and making a working stirling engine at home. 

A stirling engine is a little bit like a steam engine that uses no steam! Instead, it heats, cools, and recycles the same air or gas over and over again to produce useful power that can drive a machine. Stirling engines sound like cutting-edge technology, but they've actually been around since 1816. Stirling engines are becoming increasingly popular for harnessing renewable energy. 

No money was to be spent by our students, everything was recycled -and no kits from eBay were allowed either. This is a fiendishly difficult engine to get working and only about 10% of our Mk1 prototypes actually got going - but the effort and skill applied by our young engineers was outstanding.  If you are in Y9 - get thinking!

Please see the photo gallery below