A LITTLE-known invention by a Church of Scotland minister almost 200 years ago could help to reduce the world’s insatiable and ever-growing appetite for oil.
As prices on the oil markets continue to approach their highest for 21 years - threatening a repeat of the fuel protests of four years ago - a leading expert on the Stirling engine has claimed it could reduce petrol and diesel consumption in motor vehicles by more than half.
Dr Peter Waddell, a retired reader in mechanical engineering at Strathclyde University, believes the internal combustion engine - workhorse of the western world for more than a century - could be replaced by a modern interpretation of Robert Stirling’s 1812 engine.
He claims that, using new advances in technology, the Stirling engine could easily match a modern petrol or diesel engine of a similar capacity, but with an improvement in efficiency of about 30 per cent.
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