Quote:
Originally Posted by Duffman
I had a couple professors ingrain in me to be careful with terms like more efficient and in your case superior. If the stirling truly was superior, they would be everywhere, including in cars, ships and aircraft.
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Notice I said superior in efficiency. Until recently, fuel efficiency has not exactly been a high priority anywhere. Oil has been so cheap that few made any attempt to use less. Factor in the Stirling engine's other inherent qualities - long warm-up time, slow response to acceleration, etc, and you find that that in a world of cheap gas the IC wins out.
However, as the other poster said, the Stirling engine's qualities match well with a hybrid drivetrain. You start and accelerate on battery power, and the Stirling comes on to provide cruise power and keep the battery charged.
If you read up on the history of the Stirling engine, you'll see that a lot of work was done with them during the first oil crisis, back in the 1970s. Then, since that incident was purely political, oil became cheap again, and the work was shelved. Today oil prices are not likely to return to the levels of a few years ago, and there are other factors such as the need to reduce CO2 emissions that won't change. We also have the electric side of the hybrid drivetrain, which wasn't workable in the '70s.