Design and simulation of a small capacity thermoacoustic refrigerator

Abstract

Thermoacoustic refrigerators use acoustic power to transport heat from a low-temperature reservoir to a high-temperature reservoir through a stack in a resonance tube. These devices nowadays can be considered as an alternative cooling technology as they use environmentally friendly working fluids and have few moving components. This paper presents the design procedure of a small thermoacoustic refrigerator with nominal cooling power of 10 W. It explains the design choices with the reasons for using specific parameters. The design strategy applies simplified linear model of thermoacoustic in order to find optimum length and position of the stack. The model of the device was simulated by using a specialized tool DELTAEC. The simulation was performed under different temperatures of the cold heat exchanger varying from 250 to 295 K, and under different drive ratios varying from 0.006 to 0.016. The simulation results show that the cooling power of the refrigerator increases with the increase in the drive ratio and with the increase in the temperature of the cold heat exchanger. It was also found that the EER and the EERC coefficients of the device majorly depend on the temperature difference between the heat exchangers and only slightly depend on the drive ratio. The model achieved maximum cooling power of 55 W at the drive ratio of 0.016 and at the temperature difference between the heat exchangers of 5 K, which corresponded to EER of 2.03 and EERC of 0.034.

Design and Optimization of a Standing-Wave Thermoacoustic Refrigerator Using DELTAEC

“…The resonance frequency of the thermoacoustic refrigerator is used to estimate the resonator's length. [22]. Typically, the resonator length is a quarter or half wavelength for a standing wave thermoacoustic refrigerator.…”

“…The researchers also interested in numerical and experimental thermoacoustic refrigerator investigations to improve the stack's parameters [16][17][18][19][20][21]. Kajurek et al [22] the procedure for designing a small thermos-acoustic refrigerator with a nominal cooling capacity of 10 W and a difference in temperature of 30 K between the AHX and CHX. Shivakumara and Bheemsha [23] conducted an experimental study on a standing-wave thermoacoustc refrigerator to study the performance of the thermoacoustic refrigerator at 2 and 10W.…”