Fundamental study of a thermoacoustic refrigerator

Abstract

Nowadays there are demands on the refrigerator which will be used under maintenance-free condition. In particular, it is hoped that the thermoacoustic refrigerator will be used in artificial satellites, air conditioners, and so forth because of its simplicity and high reliability. This refrigerator has no mechanical parts in its system which cause friction loss and is similar in its refrigeration process to the basic-type pulse tube refrigerator. In this paper, a thermoacoustic refrigerator has been manufactured and its performance is discussed both experimentally and analytically. In experiments investigating the basic performance of this refrigerator, the stacks (which correspond to the regenerator of the pulse tube) of both the stainless-steel parallel plate and the ceramic capillary tube were installed in the resonance tube of quarter-wavelength. The temperature profiles were measured 50 mm apart along the tube. From experimental results, a COP of 0.334 has been obtained. In addition, the theoretical analysis using an advanced enthalpy flow model has been performed. A comparison between predicted and experimental performances was made, a qualitative agreement between them was obtained, and, finally, the effectiveness of the model was confirmed.