Stirling engine

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Stirling engine

n.
A heat engine driven by a permanently enclosed gas that expands and contracts as it is alternately heated and cooled by an external source of heat and a heat exchanger.
[After the Reverend Robert Stirling (1790-1878), Scottish clergyman and engineer who invented it.]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Stirling engine

n
(Mechanical Engineering) an external-combustion engine that uses air or an inert gas as the working fluid operating on a highly efficient thermodynamic cycle (the Stirling cycle)
[named after Robert Stirling (1790–1878), Scottish minister who invented it]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
References in periodicals archive ?
It then drives a piston inside the sterling engine, which creates mechanical energy that is harnessed with an alternator to produce electricity, similar in some aspects to an automobile engine.
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Last year I got a Crookes radiometer and a few years before that I was given a little Sterling engine. I rather fancy one of the Sterling engines made by Bohm this year.
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Sterling Engine 2 is the primary response rescue /pumper for the Town of Sterling.
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He also noticed in a local newspaper read by one of the guards last month that a private company was going to import a Sterling engine - a heat engine operating through the cyclic compression and expansion of air and other gases.
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In direct-heated Sterling engine systems, a Sterling engine, fixed at the focal point of a solar array using mirrors or lenses, is driven by the solar-heated expansion of air or other gases.
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