Design of solar stirling engine and comparison with photovoltaic solar panel system efficiency

At the present days, the quick consumption of fossil-! (fossil-based) resources and the damages that it gives to environment have caused people to tend towards alternative energy resources. As energy need has been increasing continously, renewable energy resources are needed in order not to face energy bottlenecks in the future. Solar energy is the most existing one and can be easily found among other renewable energy resources, and our country has a high potential in terms of solar enegry. On this study, the potential of solar energy in the world and Turkey and the methods to produce electricity from sun are given with a literature survey. Also, the relation of cost and efficiency-performance of solar electric production from past to our days has been analyzed, and various type of stable FV panel systems, sun tracker systems and SMGTS sample designs have been examined..Especiallythe studies have been made on ANSYS Product 13.5 and Ideal Adiabatic v.1.x Stirling Engine simulation programs, and it has been seen that the electrical efficiency could be increased without requiring high temperatures with the method of increasing temperature difference among displacer edges. Design and manufacture of a beta-type Stirling engine has been made and the Stirling engine assembled on a sun tracker system working with solar energy has been examined. SMGTS, stable FV panel system and sun-tracker based FV panel system have been compared in terms of electrical production and efficiency. The obtained results show that the sun-tracker based FV panel system and SMGTS are more efficient than stable FV panel system with an average of 25.7% and 32%, respectively. Suggestions to increase electrical efficiency have been made, based on cost analysis of SMGTS and stable and moving FV panel systems. Consequently, it has been determined that by using intensive solar energy systems such as Stirling engine that has been already applied in our study, the electric production capacity from sun could be further increased in regions with high temperature averages.