Design and analysis of a free-piston stirling engine for space nuclear power reactor

The free-piston Stirling engine (FPSE) has been widely used in aerospace owing to its advantages of high efficiency, high reliability, and self-starting ability. In this paper, a 20-kW FPSE is proposed by analyzing the requirements of space nuclear power reactor. A code was developed based on an improved simple analysis method to evaluate the performance of the proposed FPSE. The code is benchmarked with experimental data, and the maximum relative error of the output power is 17.1%. Numerical results show that the output power is 21 kW, which satisfies the design requirements. The results show that: a) reducing the pressure shell’s thickness can improve the output power significantly; b) the system efficiency increases with the wire porosity, while the growth of system efficiency decreases when the porosity is higher than 80%, and system efficiency exhibits a linear relationship with the temperatures of the cold and hot sides; c) the system efficiency increases with the compression ratio; the compression ratio increases by 16.7% while the system efficiency increases by 42%. This study can provide valuable theoretical support for the design and analysis of FPSEs for space nuclear power reactors.