One of the things which really, really rustles my jimmies is computer nerds talking about matter the way they talk about Stirling engines. Someone once upon a t

One of the things which really, really rustles my jimmies is computer nerds talking about matter the way they talk about Stirling engines. Someone once upon a time told them that Stirling engines were efficient heat engines which work on diffuse heat sources, and suddenly, Mr nerd wants to stick them everywhere. No. Unlike using some sorting or hashing algorithm, there are tradeoffs and complexities in technologies involving matter beyond anything you do in your day to day work. "Stirling engine" isn't some kind of algorithm you can put everywhere like your favorite red-black tree implementation. Stirling engines, like all heat engines, work more efficiently with large temperature differentials: this means advanced materials. External combustion immediately puts you in a weird and unfamiliar engineering place where you have the firey bits outside the piston where you can do the usual things to keep it under control. Cooling is also different from just farting out exhaust and pumping water through the block in a normal engine. If you don't have a large temperature differential you have shitty efficiency and it's not worth doing. Practical Stirling engines which do useful work, whether for heating or cooling, are usually large, have sealed, pressurized helium as working fluids (oh? you don't know about working fluids in Stirling engines?), complicated gearing mechanisms and sometimes even magnetic coupling to the outside world, and have extremely complex and precision machine parts compared to the slop you see in consumer grade items like a Porsche Engine. Ratios in the engine are often tailored to a very specific use case; and will work for shit if your heat spec is outside that very, very narrow use case. Go have a look at what goes into designing a real world Stirling engine for example in [0]. People don't use Otto/Rankine/Brayton/whatever because of some live-steam or anti-Stirling conspiracy: they use it because Stirling engines, outside of a few mostly unimportant use cases, are usually expensive and shit. The two most widespread industrial uses of the things I can think of were a Chrysler air conditioner[1] and a coleman beer cooler[2], both using the same Japanese built Stirling cooler. Even in these use cases, which, mind you are using a Stirling engine in reverse from what HN weebs want them for, they didn't exactly cover themselves in glory. They were expensive, heavy, fragile and not as efficient as would justify their bad qualities over a more standard cooling unit. [0]https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19830022057 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19830022057 [1] https://docplayer.net/40169613-The-reliability-development-of-miniature-stirling-cryocoolers.html https://docplayer.net/40169613-The-reliability-development-o... (I think) [2]https://kk.org/cooltools/coleman-stirlin/ https://kk.org/cooltools/coleman-stirlin/