ABSTRACT
Much of the material reported in this chapter is based on editing of information from a Žnal report to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) (Ibrahim et al., 2003). That DOE effort was aimed at improving performance of Stirling devices (engines in particular) via better understanding of regenerator losses, so that Stirling regenerator performance could be improved. The effort was aimed, primarily, at the widely used random-Žber regenerators, even though the large-scale test specimens were stacked wire screens. Because it was decided that insights into regenerator operation could be enhanced by measurements within the regenerator matrices, it was necessary to scale up the geometries sufŽciently to enable measurements within large-scale matrices. Scaling of the geometries also required scaling of the experimental parameters, in order to maintain the magnitude of the important dimensionless parameters close to those expected in the Stirling engines of interest.
