There, I learned about this wild device: the Stirling Engine (2). A single wheel driven by part of a piston's action from a heat differential. The rest of the drive comes from the remainder of it's action. It's very smart and it's a centuries old idea:
Devices called air engines have been recorded from as early as 1699 around the time when the laws of gasses were first set out. The English inventor Sir George Caley is known to have devised air engines c. 1807. Robert Stirling's innovative contribution of 1816 was what he called the 'Economiser' now known as the regenerator which acts to retain heat in the hot portion of the engine as the air passes to the cold part and thus improve the efficiency.
During the nineteenth century the Stirling engine found applications anywhere a source of low to medium power was required , a role that was eventually usurped by the electric motor at the century's end.
It was also employed in reverse as a heat pump to produce early refrigeration.
In the late 1940's the Philips Electronics company in The Netherlands were searching for a versatile electricity generator to enable worldwide expansion of sales of its electronic devices in areas with no reliable electricity infrastructure. The company put a huge R&D research effort into Stirling engines building on research it had started in the 1930s and which lasted until the 1970's. The only lasting commercial spin-off from this for Philips was its reversed Stirling engine: the Stirling cryocooler.
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