Experimental study of a thermoacoustically-driven traveling wave thermoacoustic refrigerator

摘要

New configurations of traveling wave thermoacoustic refrigerators driven by a traveling wave thermoacoustic engine were introduced and tested in this paper. First, the performance of the refrigerator with different-diameter inertance tubes was investigated experimentally. Then, investigation of substituting a flexible membrane attached to inertial mass for inertance tube was tested. The experimental results show that the substitution could improve the efficiency of the system and lead to a larger cooling power. So far, using helium gas as the working gas, the system could provide 340 W cooling power at the temperature of -20 °C with working frequency of 57 Hz and average pressure of 3.0 MPa. The total COP, i.e. cooling power divided by heating power, is 0.16.