THERMOACOUSTICS REFRIGERATOR

INTRODUCTION:
From creating comfortable home environment to manufacturing fast and efficient
electronic devices, air conditioning and refrigeration remain essential services for both homes
and industries. It is becoming increasingly important in the design and development of
refrigerating systems to consider environmental impacts. To eliminate the use of environmentally
hazardous refrigerants, research efforts are focusing more on the development of alternative
refrigerants and alternative refrigeration technologies. An approach in the category of alternative
technologies is thermo acoustic refrigeration which produces cooling from sound. The
thermoacoustic effect was first discovered in the 19th century when heat driven acoustic
oscillations were observed in open-ended glass tubes. These devices were the first
thermoacoustic engines, consisting of a bulb attached to a long narrow tube. It was in the 1980s
that thermoacoustic refrigerator was first developed, when a research group at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory showed that the effect could be used to pump heat. The technology has seen
rapid growth since then, developing it to a promising asset as a clean and environmentally
friendly refrigeration method.

Emmanuel c. Nsofor and Azrai Ali (2009) studied on the performance of the thermoacoustic
refrigerating system with respect to some critical operating parameters. Experiments were
performed on the system under various operating conditions. The experimental setup consists of
the thermoacoustic refrigerating system with appropriate valves for the desired controls,
instrumentation and the electronic data acquisition system. The resonator was constructed from
aluminum tubing but it had plastic tube lining on the inside to reduce heat loss by conduction.
Significant factors that influence the performance of the system were identified. The cooling
produced increases with the temperature difference between the two ends of the stack. High
pressure in the system does not necessarily result in a higher cooling load. There exists an
optimum pressure and an optimum frequency for which the system should be operated in order
to obtain maximum cooling load. Consequently, for the thermoacoustic refrigeration system,
there should be a related compromise between cooling load, pressure and frequency for best
performance. Ramesh Nayak.B. et al. (2011) proposed the design of a Thermo Acoustic
Refrigerator (TAR) stack. The design strategy has been described along with the values of the
important working gas parameters as well as the non-dimensional parameters. The design and
optimization of thermo acoustic refrigerator for a cooling power of 10 watt was designed. An
attempt has been made to design the TAR by using CATIA. Further modelling and optimization
of the design is carried out using MATLAB. Jonathan Newman et al. (2006) explored the basic
principles of thermoacoustic refrigeration, to produce a small thermoacoustic refrigerator out of
readily available parts. The model constructed for this research project employed inexpensive,
household materials. Although the model did not achieve the original goal of refrigeration, the
experiment suggests that thermoacoustic refrigerators could one day be viable replacements for
conventional refrigerators.

Vapour Compression Refrigeration Systems:

Vapour compression refrigeration systems are the most commonly used among all
refrigeration systems. As the name implies, these systems belong to the general class of vapour
cycles, wherein the working fluid (refrigerant) undergoes phase change at least during one
process. In a vapour compression refrigeration system, refrigeration is obtained as the refrigerant
evaporates at low temperatures. The input to the system is in the form of mechanical energy
required to run the compressor.

Hence these systems are also called as mechanical refrigeration systems. Vapour compression
refrigeration systems are available to suit almost all applications with the refrigeration capacities
ranging from few Watts to few megawatts. A wide variety of refrigerants can be used in these
systems to suit different applications, capacities etc. The actual vapour compression cycle is
based on Evans-Perkins cycle, which is also called as reverse Rankine cycle. Before the actual
cycle is discussed and analyzed, it is essential to find the upper limit of performance of vapour
compression cycles. This limit is set by a completely reversible cycle.

DISADVANTAGES:
Require CFC, HCFC, or other ozone harming refrigerants

Increase global warming effect

Loud/noisy

Typical efficiency is 40-55% of Carnot limit

Moving parts and intricate design
Prone to breakdown

PRINCIPLE:
Thermoacoustics is based on the principle that sound waves are pressure waves. These
sound waves propagate through air via molecular collisions. The molecular collision cause a
disturbance in the air, which in turn creates constructive and destructive interference. The
constructive interference makes the molecules compress, and the destructive interference makes
the molecules expand. This principle is the basis behind the thermoacoustic refrigerator.
Refrigeration relies on two major thermodynamic principles. First, a fluids temperature rises
when compressed and falls when expanded. Second, when two substances are placed in direct
contact, heat will flow from the hotter substance to the cooler one.
There are two types of thermoacoustic devices namely thermoacoustic engine and
thermoacoustic refrigerator. In a thermoacoustic engine, heat is converted into sound energy and
this energy is available for the useful work. In a thermoacoustic refrigerator the reverse process
occurs, i.e. it utilizes work in the form of acoustic per to absorb heat from a low temperature
medium and reject it to a high temperature medium.

THERMOACOUSTIC EFFECT:
Acoustic waves experience displacement oscillations, and temperature oscillations in
association with the pressure variations. In order to produce thermoacoustic effect these
oscillations in the gas should occur close to a solid surface so that heat can be transferred to or
from the surface. A stack of closely spaced parallel plates is placed inside the thermoacoustic
device in order to provide such a solid surface. The thermoacoustic phenomenon occurs by the
interaction of the gas particles and the stack plate.
 When large temperature gradients are created across the stack, sound waves are generated i.e.
work is produced in the form of acoustic power (forming a thermoacoustic engine). In the
reverse case, the acoustic work is used in order to create temperature gradients across the stack,
which is used to transfer heat from a low temperature medium to a high temperature medium (as
the case of thermoacoustic refrigerator).
A thermoacoustic refrigerator consists of a tube filled with a gas. This tube is closed at one
end and an oscillating device (a loud speaker) is placed at the other end to create an acoustic
standing wave inside the tube. Standing waves are natural phenomena exhibited by sound waves.
In a closed tube, columns of air demonstrate these patterns as sound waves reflect back on
themselves after colliding with the end of the tube. When the incident and reflected waves
overlap, they interfere constructively, producing a single waveform. This wave cause the medium
to vibrate in isolated sections as the travelling waves are masked by the interference. Therefore
these standing waves seem to vibrate in constant position and orientation around stationary
nodes. These nodes are located where the two component sound waves interfere to create areas
of zero net displacement. The areas of maximum net displacement are located halfway between
two nodes and are called antinodes. The maximum compression of the air also occurs at the
antinode. Due to these node and antinode properties, standing waves are useful because only a
small input of power is needed to create a large amplitude wave to cause thermoacoustic effect.

BASIC COMPONENTS:
A thermoacoustic machine generally consists of:
1. Acoustic driver
2. Stack or regenerator
3. Heat exchanger
4. Resonator
ACOUSTIC DRIVER:
The purpose of the loudspeaker is to supply work to the system in the form of sound waves.
Their original range was from 160Hz to 650Hz. Then they discovered their resonance frequency
(Frequency with best temperature differences) is 280Hz. At the same time they did other
measurements at 350Hz. Because of this we decided that our range should include both of these
frequencies, to compare our results.

STACK:
The thermal conductivity of the stack material has a negative impact on the performance
of the thermoacoustic refrigerator. If the thermal conductivity of the stack material is high, the
heat which has been pumped by the system will be conducted back to the cold side, thus
reversing the cooling effect. Thus, a stack essentially must be made up of a material with low
thermal conductivity. The material Mylar which has a thermal conductivity 0.16 W/m-K is
widely used. Adef et al. The heat capacity of stack material should be quite higher than that of
the gas so that the temperature remains steady.

Thermal and Viscous Penetration Depths. Thermal penetration depth is the distance in
the gas from stack surface up to which the heat the heat can diffuse. It indicates the region
in gas where the molecules take part in the thermoacoustic effect. This thermal penetration
depth extends on both sides of the stack material.
 Stack Spacing. Since the thermal penetration depth extends on both the sides of the stack
surface, two layers must be so spaced that they do not interfere in each others thermal
penetration depth. So the stack spacing must be at least equal to 2. Its value is suggested
to be between 2 to 4. Tijani et al. Investigated the effect of stack spacing on the
performance of a thermoacoustic refrigerator. Various stacks with plate spacing ranging
from 0.15 and 0.7 mm were manufactured and analyzed. The variation of performance
parameters with the stack spacing 2yo, was studied. Where, yo = half stack spacing.

It can be observed in fig-3(a) that the temperature difference without heat load is
optimum for a stack spacing of 0.4mm (4) and indicates maximum cooling power at a
spacing of 2.5. It can be seen from that the maximum COPR is obtained at 3. Tijani
et al. suggested a stack spacing of 3.

Stack Geometry: Stacks of various geometries like the parallel plate type, spiral type,
pin-array type have been developed and studied over the years so as to get improves
performance, simplicity of manufacturing and cost effectiveness

Some geometries are discussed in this paper. A parallel plate stack consists of plates of
the stack material placed parallel to each other and separated by separator linings. Tijani
et al. manufactured two spiral stacks make up of Mylar sheet wound around a PVC rod as
illustrated in fig-5. Excessive tension in one stack resulted in deformed channels. The
other stack was carefully wound. Adeff et al. performed experiments using a stack made
of reticulated vitreous carbon, an open pore foam material made purely of vitreous
carbon.

HEAT EXCHANGER:
The heat exchangers employed in a thermoacoustic refrigerator influence the acoustic
field created in the resonator. There are many design constraints such as porosity of the heat
exchanger and high heat transfer coefficient for efficiency. Due to these constraints, special kind
of heat exchangers are used. One typical micro channel aluminum heat exchanger.

RESONATOR:
 This part of refrigerator which is only there for maintaining the acoustic wave. Because it
is a dead volume which causes heat loss and adds bulk, quarter wavelength resonators are
preferred over half wavelength.
c
l
2f

Considering length, sound reflection, sound transmission, low acoustic losses, diameter
the resonator tube must be chosen. Generally 0.5 Inch of PVC pipe is chose for resonator tube.

WORKING:
When a constant frequency tone is generated by the loudspeaker, a standing wave is
obtained in the tube. Consider a gas packet oscillating in the medium. As the gas packet expands
due to propagation of sound, its temperature falls. It absorbs heat from the stack surface in the
vicinity, thus producing a drop in temperature. As the gas parcel now moves to the high pressure

Regions, its temperature rises and it rejects heat to the stack material at this point. Thus the
pumping of heat takes place. The gas oscillates between two displacement nodes only. During
the oscillation, when it undergoes expansion, its temperature drops. It thus absorbs heat from the
stack locally in its vicinity. As the blob begins to compress while moving towards the other end
of the stack, its temperature rises and it rejects heat to the stack surface in contact. Thus heat is
pumped from one end of the stack to the other.
Starting from point 1, the packet of gas is compressed and moves to the left. As the packet is
compressed, the sound wave does work on the packet of gas, providing the power for the
refrigerator. When the gas packet is at maximum compression, the gas ejects the heat back into
the stack since the temperature of the gas is now higher than the temperature of the stack. This
phase is the refrigeration part of the cycle, moving the heat farther from the bottom of the tube.
In the second phase of the cycle, the gas is returned to the initial state. As the gas packet moves
back towards the right, the sound wave expands the gas. This process results in a net transfer of
heat to the left side of the stack. Finally, in step 4, the packets of gas reabsorb heat from the cold
reservoir to repeat the heat transfer process.

EXPERIMENTAL OUTPUT:
The temperature difference between the hot end and cold end of the stack ranged from
0C to 15C.Cooling load increases with the increase in the temperature difference between the
two ends of the stack.
For a thermoacoustics refrigerating system, there exist for a given frequency, an optimum
pressure that results in a higher cooling temperature difference and thus a higher cooling load.
This frequency is the resonance frequency.

BENEFITS:

Inert working fluid

No sliding seals or lubrication
Very few simple components
Large range of working temperatures
Intrinsically suited to proportional control
Immaturity
CONCLUSION:
Thermoacoustic engines and refrigerators were already being considered a few years ago
for specializer application, where their simplicity, lack of lubrication and their use of
environmentally harmless working fluids were adequate compensation for their lower
efficiencies. This latest breakthrough, coupled with other developments in the design of high
power, single frequency loud speakers and reciprocating electric generators suggests that
thermoacoustics may soon emerge as an environmentally attractive way to power hybrid electric
vehicles, capture solar energy, refrigerate food, air condition buildings, liquefy industrial gases
and serve in other capacities. In future let us hope that these thermoacoustic devices which
promise to improve standard of living while helping to protect the planet by completely
eliminating the use of refrigerants.