Performance of Thermoacoustic Cooler Driven by Thermoacoustic Engine with Different Flow Channel Radii

The factory-made exhaust heat is source of abundance heat all over the world. The abundance heat has been become issues for our environment, so it is essential to tackle it wisely. On the other hand, the scarcity of the renewable energy is still problem that must be overcame. Moreover, the need of environmentally friendly refrigeration in many sectors are indispensable. Therefore, using alternative technology such as thermoacoustic engine and cooler, the issues mentioned above can be handled. However, the performance of the engine and cooler are still low. Therefore, we should improve by designing the proper engine and cooler. The aim of the numerical calculation is to find the optimum flow-channel radii for obtaining high engine and cooler performance for cooling temperature at 0 oC. In this calculation, we did stability limit calculation to obtain the onset temperature and efficiency calculation for obtaining the performance by changing the radii of the engine and cooler. We found that the optimum dimensionless engine and cooler radii are 1.0 and 1.7, respectively. The total efficiency achieves 14.3 % of the upper limit value.