Basic Research on Cooke-Yarborough Cycle Machines

Cooke-Yarborough cycle (CY) machines are composed of several Stirling cycle (ST) machines and have some possibility as future external-combustion engines and/or thermally actuated heat pumps. This paper treats a CY machine with two displacers and one power piston, which is suitable for practical application. The method of CY machine analysis has been newly developed and applied to some examples. Analytical consideration shows that the CY machine is internally divided into a ST engine and a ST refrigerator in the same manner as a Vuilleumier cycle (VM) machine. The performance of the CY machine is almost equivalent to that of the VM machine under the specifications adopted in this paper, although these machines are considerably different in their pressure variation. The CY machine operates at its highest capacity when the power piston reciprocates with a delay of 90 degrees in the phase angle against the two displacers.