Thermoacoustic Sterling Engine is Now Fully 3D Printable

Would you like to make your own energy? Why, who doesn’t in this era of rising costs! A sterling engine always looks like a good fit for that: highly efficient, with no risk of a boiler explosion. A thermoacoustic sterling engine looks even better, since it has only one moving part at the output end. A thermoacoustic sterling engine you can 3D print yourself looks best of all, and that’s what [my engines] has on offer, now that even the burner and hot end of his thermoacoustic engine are designed for SLA metal printing.

We previously reported on the open-source engine, but there’ve been some improvements worth talking about. For one thing, he’s integrated a biogas/methane burner directly inside the 3D-printable hotend. For another, that 3D-printed design allows for an excellent heat exchange geometry that would be very hard to get any other way. The whole thing is open source with plans available at OwnEnergy.org, where you can find links to the apparently-mandatory Discord channel and now an old-style forum to actually collaborate on the design, which is open-source. The site is also now the home of all data and discussion about [my engines]’s homescale biogas plant, which is the power source for this little engine.

If you’d rather print a combustion engine, you can do that, too, but you’ll need more “vitamins” than this unit requires.