Instability in a thermoacoustic prime-mover: A numerical approach Stability curves for a thermoacoustic prime mover J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 1401Am. 95, (1994 10.1121/1.408580 Analysis of the initial buildup of oscillations in a thermoacoustic prime mover J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 1661 (1994); 10.1121/1.408554 Impedance and stability analysis of two thermoacoustic prime movers.
ABSTRACTThermo Acoustic Prime Movers (TAPMs) are being considered as the ideal choice for driving the Pulse Tube Cryocoolers replacing the conventional compressors. The advantages are the absence of moving components and they can be driven by low grade energy as such as fuel, gas, solar energy, waste heat etc. While the development of such TAPMs is in progress in our laboratory, their design and fabrication should be guided by numerical modeling and this may be done by several methods such as solving the energy equation [1], enthalpy flow model [2], CFD [3], etc. We have used CFD technique, since it provides a better insight into the velocity and temperature profiles. The analysis is carried out by varying parameters such as (a) temperature difference across the stack, (b) stack and resonator lengths and (c) different working fluids such as air, nitrogen, argon etc. The theoretical results are compared with the experimental data wherever possible and they are in reasonably good agreement with each other. The analysis indicate that (i) larger temperature difference across the stack leads to increased acoustic amplitude, (ii) longer resonator leads to decrease in frequency with lesser amplitude and (iii) there exists an optimal stack length for the best performance of TAPM. These results are presented here.
Thermoacoustically driven Pulse Tube Cryocooler (PTC) totally eliminates the moving components and is totally reliable towards cryogenic applications. In an objective to development of such a system, we need to design the Thermo Acoustic Prime Mover (TAPM) to drive the Pulse Tube cryocooler. We have made detailed design of the standing wave twin TAPM using the simplified linear thermoacoustic model of short stack and boundary layer approximations, based on the procedures outlined by Swift [1] and Tijani [2]. The theoretical design indicates the dependence of the system performance on stack geometry and its relative position with respect to other components for different working fluids. Based on the above design, the TAPM with different resonator lengths were fabricated and experimented. Studies have been conducted to evaluate their performance characteristics with respect to several parameters such as the resonator length, the working fluid and the operating pressure. The optimized TAPM has been used as the prime mover for a single stage Pulse Tube Cryocooler. A temperature difference of ~42 K has been measured between the hot and cold ends of the Pulse Tube. These results are presented here.
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