A Renewable Energy Solution | with 200 Years of R&D

While the SunCatcher™ solar dish Stirling system represents a genuine breakthrough solar energy technology, its journey as an industrial strength engine covers nearly 200 years of research and development, on different continents, and across multiple industry applications.

Stirling Engines were developed shortly after Robert Stirling first described the thermodynamic cycle that bears his name in 1816. Over the years, Stirling engines have been used in agricultural, manufacturing, naval, commercial and automotive applications. They are recognized for their efficiency, reliability, and because they can use almost any external heat source to power the engine – including solar heat.

The Stirling engine has long been acknowledged as one of the most innovative and efficiently designed engines ever conceived and built. It uses a continual recycling process of heating and cooling from an external heat source; creating significant temperature changes inside cylinders, that are responsible for reciprocating mechanical pistons, that produce energy output. Later in the century, there were engineering breakthroughs to its closed-loop system that efficiently recycled its heat energy – called the new ‘regenerative cycle’.

After over a decade of substantial development work by scientists and engineering teams, and NTR’s long term investment funding, the SunCatcher Solar Dish Stirling System is ready to produce utility scale grid-quality electricity from our most abundant energy resource, solar-thermal heat.