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A thermoacoustic refrigerator is a device which uses acoustic power to pump heat in the absence of harmful refrigerants with no or few moving parts. However, the performance of the thermoacoustic refrigerator, particularly the standing wave types, is currently not competitive compared to its counterpart conventional vapor-compression refrigerator. Presently, thermoacoustic refrigeration prototypes only achieved 0.1-0.2 relative coefficient of performance compared with that of 0.33-0.5 for the conventional vapor-compression refrigerators. Past optimization efforts had been completed based on parametric studies where individual parameters are discretely varied and the final optimized outcome was based on the Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 22:37 25 June 2016 ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 2 limited series of numerical/experimental tests. This paper discussed the initial investigation of the optimization of the thermoacoustic refrigerator stack parameters using multi-objective genetic algorithm. The desired output, the maximization of the cooling load and the minimization of the acoustic power at the stack, are obtained with the parameters to be optimized set within some range of values. The stack length and centre position are then optimized simultaneously. The optimized results showed that, the coefficient of performance of the thermoacoustic refrigerator improves from the published value of 1.3 to 1.37.

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