A Stirling engine repeatedly heats and cools a confined gas, whose expansion and compression drive a moving mechanical load. This makes it a particularly accessible example of a heat engine: both the repeating motion and the two regions exchanging heat can be observed.
In the published Demonstration experiments with a Stirling engine by Christopher G Deacon and others, an electrical heater warms one end of a cylinder and flowing water cools the other at . A moving displacer shuttles gas through copper wool that temporarily stores and returns internal energy. A laser spot traces a closed pressure-volume path on a screen: mechanical motion controls one coordinate, pressure the other. Calibrating both scales converts the enclosed area to work per thermodynamic cycle; multiplying by rotation frequency gives gas-cycle power. At heater input, the paper reports gas-cycle power, while a separate Prony brake measures shaft output. The cold-side temperature is controlled and two higher heater settings are compared. The gas has a nonuniform temperature, and heater energy also escapes to the room: neither output/input ratio measures for an ideal two-thermal reservoir engine. These observations demonstrate work production and losses, not a direct measurement of the bound in Carnot's theorem. The inspected apparatus, readouts and results are on pp. 180–182, Figures 1–3 and Table 1.
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