Design, Fabrication and Analysis of Thermo-Acoustic Refrigeration System

Mechanical Engineering

Thermo-acoustic refrigeration is an environmental friendly technology. Its biggest advantages are that they do not use harmful gas as a refrigerant. For the safety of the environment, it is necessary to avoid the use of environmentally hazardous refrigeration by developing new alternative refrigeration technologies such as Thermo-acoustic Refrigeration System. The main aim of this work is to design and construct a small thermo-acoustic refrigerator from inexpensive and readily available parts and analyzed the results. The design includes dimension of stack, selection of acoustic driver, and acoustic resonator. The experiments showed that while thermo-acoustic cooling was possible, high efficiency was beyond our reach due to materials restrictions. We obtained the temperature difference of 120-130 C across stacks for constructing this simple device. Experiments show the performance can improve by using better materials such as high heat carrying capacity materials stack. Further research and development is needed in order to explore the full potential of the device in refrigeration applications.

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