STIRLING INNOVATIONS, LLC TECHNOLOGY LEGACY AND RESOURCES
Stirling Innovations is a small startup company, but it has access to extensive expertise and the ability to execute on its plan when suitable funding resources become available. SI was founded in 2021 for the express purpose of developing and commercializing delta Stirling machines and GREAT TES. The legacy technology timeline in the diagram provides context for the background technology developments that enabled delta Stirling machines and GREAT TES. While the timeline is strictly accurate only for SI founder Maury White, the progress at every stage was totally a team effort. More than a dozen former Stirling engineer colleagues have expressed an interest in supporting the delta development effort as resources become available.
LEGACY FPS TIMELINE FOR DELTA STIRLING
The journey began in 1962 when Mr. White was assigned to work with Ted Finkelstein, who had just been hired by Atomics International (AI) to develop his concept for a free-piston Stirling engine with potential application as a power source for space nuclear power. Dr. Finkelstein and Mr. White analytically modeled and built crude models of a 4-cylinder DAA FPS demonstrator and a separate linear alternator. After a year and a half with good progress on both fronts, a Vice-President of AI parent company North American Rockwell became aware of this IRAD effort and asserted that linear alternators were not feasible because a crack engineering team he managed at Sundstrand had tried and failed to develop a linear alternator. The AI Stirling effort was terminated that day. Two years later, Dr. Bill Martini, who had worked on thermionic space power systems in the same group with Dr. Finkelstein and Mr. White, became a founding Manager at the newly established Donald W. Douglas Laboratories (DWDL) of Douglas Aircraft Co. (subsequently McDonnell Douglas) in Richland, WA. Dr. Martini had been intrigued with the FPS work at AI and convinced DWDL management to fund an internal FPS project. He then hired Maury White to initiate that effort. By this time, Dr. William Beale, to whom Dr. Finkelstein had described the AI FPS project, had reduced a beta FPS feasibility demonstrator to practice. All FPS work for four decades was limited to beta and gamma configurations.
IN MEMORIAM: TED FINKELSTEIN
Ted Finkelstein is the person who first conceived of a free-piston Stirling (FPS) engine. That fact was lost in the general Stirling lore after William Beale, Founder of Sunpower, became the first person to successfully reduce an FPS engine to practice. In 2007 John Corey, editor of Stirling Machine World, a quarterly newsletter for the Stirling community, asked me to write an article honoring Ted for the newsletter. That article is reprinted below in its original format as a memorial tribute to Ted and the incalculable impact his presence made on the Stirling world. Ted passed away in 2022 at the age of 97.
Contribution as published in Stirling Machine World 2007-4
Personal Commentary on My Friend and Mentor, Ted Finkelstein
by Maury White
Ted Finkelstein has had an extraordinary impact on the present state of Stirling technology. Most researchers in the field are aware of some of his groundbreaking analytical work and have an awareness of some of his published works. After receiving the first PhD in Stirling cycle machines, he worked on them a relatively few years as a full time employee but has diligently pursued them as a lifetime avocation. While the well known tangible results of Ted's work are a wide range of publications and a few working models, his connections to so much of what we know as the Stirling world today are not recognized by many. I have had the privilege to observe the fallout from those connections, perhaps more closely than anyone else, so this SMW profile initiated by John Corey is a great venue for sharing this bit of Stirling history.