Modelling and Controller Design of Resonant Thermoacoustic Solar AC Power Generators

System Identification and Resonant Control of Thermoacoustic Engines for Robust Solar Power

“…There are numerous strategies of active control for thermoacoustic propulsion ever presented in the literature, for instance [29][30][31][32][33][34]. Furthermore, unlike Stirling engines, the thermoacoustic engines are alternating-current (AC) machines as such, so a standing-wave thermoacoustic engine with an AC current generator and under resonant control can has much larger power-rating than traveling-wave thermoacoustic engines [1,35,36].…”

“…Therein the regenerator is designed to have less thermal capacity and higher bandwidth than those in passive thermoacoustic engines to make effective the heat-flux actuation on the acoustic resonator. The van der Pol oscillator (VDP) was ever applied as an open-loop controller that switches a photo valve at a single resonant-frequency [36]. This simple controller may work well in lab, but in real operation it is unable to keep the resonance all the time, since the working temperature is always of uncertainty and time-variance.…”

“…The synthesized feedback-controller is then programmed into a Microchip-dsPIC chip that online pitches the engine to the most powerful frequency robustly and accurately. In the frequency-domain identification, the frequency generation is mainly performed by the higher-damping VDP (HD-DVP), which is extended from the conventional VDP in [36] for more accurate generation and faster modulation of frequencies. The HD-VDP in series with a low-pass filter is then programmed into the dsPIC chip that generates genuinely sinusoidal signals with preset frequencies.…”

“…To remove such a trade-off between steady accuracy and transient dexterousness, we can reduce the damping adjuster  , but increase the damping order n . This is the main advantage of the HD-VDP over the conventional VDP according to 1 n  in [36].…”