EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL INVESTIGATION OF LOW COST STANDING WAVE THERMOACOUSTIC REFRIGERATION

All conventional refrigeration and air conditioning use environmentally sensitive refrigerants. The HCFC’s or HFC’s may lead to higher global warming than CO2. Thermoacoustic Refrigeration (TAR) is an option and deals with thermodynamics, fluid dynamics and acoustics. TAR operates with inert fluids, no frictional losses and less maintenance cost. The development of low cost standing-wave thermoacoustic refrigerator has been undertaken by many researchers. This paper presents experimental study of low cost glass stack TAR with stack material and stack position as parameters of study. An experimental setup for experimentation and validation of numerical analysis is developed. Experimentally, maximum temperature of 11K for Glass fibres with glass capillary tube spacers kept at 0.15m position from speaker inlet in glass resonator of 0.02m diameter and 0.242 m length, with air as fluid medium, with acoustic sine wave frequency of 350 Hz and amplitude 10 kPa is obtained. Numerical analysis of capillary glass tubes stack with stack and resonator dimensions, stack position as well as boundary condition approximately same as the experimental conditions, is done as case study. CFD software, ICEM CFD 14.5 and Fluent 14.5 on ANSYS workbench 14.5 is used for the case study and results are presented here. Temperature difference of 6K is obtained. The experimental values and numerical values are in good agreement.