Stirling Engine

Given raw material and general design constraints...

I designed, manufactured, and tested a fully-functional mechanical gamma type engine system powered exclusively by heat and initial kinetic energy. Upon receiving half the designs, I was tasked to design the rest of the engine with my creative expression. I modeled over 30+ individual components such as the flywheel, piston connecting rods, baseplate, and heat sink via SolidWorks. I also drafted engineering drawings for manufacturability and conducted GD&T analysis using tolerance stack-ups.

Over the course of the semester...

I used my engineering drawings and manufactured each of the designed components using methods such as CNC milling, lathing, sawing, sanding, grinding, and polishing. By the end of the semester, I successfully built an engine that spun at over 1300 rpm upon application of heat via a butane torch.