Optimized heat exchanger unit in a thermoacoustic refrigerator

Abstract

Due to concern over the environmental impact caused by hazardous refrigerants, the last ten years or so has seen increasing research into thermoacoustic refrigeration. A thermoacoustic refrigerator is a device which uses acoustic power to pump heat. It holds the merits of simple mechanical design, absence of harmful refrigerants and having no or few moving parts. However, the performance of the thermoacoustic refrigerator, particularly the standing wave types, is currently not competitive compared to its counterpart conventional vapor-compression refrigerator. Thermoacoustic refrigeration prototypes, built up-to-date, achieved 0.1-0.2 relative coefficient of performance (COPR) compared with that of 0.33-0.5 for the conventional vapor-compression refrigerators. The poor heat exchanger design is one of the reasons for this poor efficiency. This paper discussed the influence of the thermoacoustic refrigerator heat exchanger's parameters on its design and the optimization of the performance of the system using the Lagrange multiplier method. The results showed that, the dissipated power is less than the published value by about 49% in the cold heat exchanger and about 38.5% in the hot heat exchanger. Furthermore, the increase of the cold heat exchanger effectiveness is found to be 3%. Thus, the decrease in the dissipated power in both heat exchangers with effective cold heat exchanger increases the performance of the thermoacoustic refrigerator.