ABSTRACT
At the National Defense Academy of Japan, Noboru Kagawa and his staff and students have developed a “mesh-sheet” regenerator that has some similarities to wire screen but with the meshes much more regular than traditional wire screen (Furutani et al., 2006; Kitahama et al., 2003; Matsuguchi et al., 2005, 2008; Takeuchi et al., 2004; Takizawa et al., 2002). Wire screen is formed from wires woven to form an approximately square grid of wires perpendicular to which the ¨uid in a Stirling regenerator ¨ows. In contrast, the mesh sheets, which also have approximately square openings for ¨uid ¨ow, are formed by chemical etching of a metal sheet. The chemical etching used to fabricate the mesh sheets allows freedom in choice of the various detailed dimensions of the meshes not available to fabricators of traditional wire-screen mesh. Attempts have been made to optimize the detailed dimensions of the mesh sheets for a particular Stirling engine, the ∼3 kW NS03T (Kagawa, 1988, 2002). Several mesh-sheet combinations (two types of mesh sheets used alternately in the regenerator stack) have also been tested in the NS03T and in a relatively new doubleacting ∼3-kW engine, the SERENUM05 (Kagawa et al., 2007; Matsuguchi et al., 2009).
