The working gas would be argon, which is also a reactant. Argon will from a short lived molecule with hydrogen. Helium will not. Too bad since He has better heat transfer properties.
For a closed-cycle piston engine of this sort to work, the piston crown and the facing cylinder head would need to be catalytic for the formation of dense hydrogen when exposed to a mixed pressurized gas of hydrogen and argon. A very large compression ratio would be possible. Ideally dense hydrogen on this catalytic surface would then combine immediately as it is being formed - with argon - at TDC which will them form argonium with exotherm For this cycle to repeat ad infinitum, the argonium would need to decay at BDC. The normal version of argonium according to Wiki has a lifetime of 2+ milliseconds which may be too short for realistic rotational speed. Thus – another miracle needed for this to work at all, is that the denser form of argonium would need to have a lifetime of about 10 milliseconds for a resonance at about 6000 RPM. No one has published anything about a dense form or argonium or any other molecule containing dense hydrogen. Maybe dense hydrogen will not bind to argon at all. This is why experimenter need to be able to make dense hydrogen reliably – to characterize all its properties, and AFAIK no independent researcher can do this now. Jones— In your engine conceptual design what is the working gas that is heated and then does work in the decompression portion of the cycle? Is it the Ar-H gas or a separate gas that is heated by the release of energy from the reactants in the “reaction chamber” (as the cylinder might be called) but not modified by the release of energy . For example,heliume might work well and be conserved without modification in a hermetically “reaction chamber that contained a “fuel” that would react with an appropriate EM trigger—“spark plug.” Introduction of additional fuel stored within the hermetically sealed envelop could be accomplished after the original charge was sufficiently depleted—maybe a day, a week or longer, depending the dynamics of the system parameters that affect the reaction. Bob Cook . ➢ In a closed-cycle piston engine, particularly a Stirling-type, the suggestion is that there could be an inherent thermodynamic advantage in having sequential reactions which are exothermic on formation and then endothermic milliseconds later, on the expansion stroke.,,,, A resonance could then be engineered, especially if the decay was sharp and reliable and the engine ran at one speed only. However, this may not be what happens in practice with argon and hydrogen. ➢ If the lifetime of argonium happened with endotherm precisely at BDC, then that could present a bonus cooling effect in addition to the change in displacement. This would arguably increase the Carnot spread between the hot end and cold end of the Stirling. I have not been able to find evidence for this type of thermodynamic cycle in the literature.
