INVESTIGATION ON THE THERMOACOUSTIC CONVERSION CHARACTERISTIC OF THE REGENERATOR

摘要

Regenerator is the core component in the regenerative heat engines,such as thermoacoustic heat engine,Stirling engine and so on.In the regenerator,the thermoacoustic effect happens between the working gas and solid wall converting heat into acoustic work.In this paper,a novel experiment setup is developed to investigate the thermoacoustic conversion characteristic of the regenerator.In this system,two linear motors act as compressor to provide acoustic work to the regenerator and the other two linear motors serve as alternator to consume the acoustic work out of the regenerator.By changing the impedance of the alternator,the phase angle of the volume velocity of the regenerator can be varied within a large range.In the experiments,the influence of phase angle,heating temperature and different material types on the performance of the regenerator are studied in detail.The experimental results demonstrate that the output acoustic power increases as the volume velocity phase angle difference between the compression and expansion pistons rises to 120°,while the thermoacoustic efficiency has different optimum values with different heating temperature.Additionally,it also shows that flow resistance and heat transfer area are very important to the regenerator performance.In the experiments,a maximum output acoustic power of 661W and a highest thermoacoustic efficiency of 35.6％are obtained with random fiber type regenerator under 4 MPa pressurized helium and 650℃ heating temperature.This work provides an efficient way to investigate the thermoacoustic conversion characteristic of the regenerator of the regenerative heat engines.