Study on Heat-driven Thermoacoustic Refrigerator for Room Temperature Cooling

A novel direct-coupling thermoacoustic refrigerator for low-grade thermal energy application is proposed in this paper. The direct-coupling thermoacoustic refrigerator contains two identical core units, which consists of a thermoacoustic engine, a thermoacoustic refrigerator, resonance tubes and a capacitive cavity connected in sequence. The resonance tube and capacitive cavity can realize phase adjustment between the units. This paper focuses on the influence of the phase modulation capability of the resonance tube and capacitive cavity on the inlet and outlet phase angles, the acoustic work generation and consumption of the engine and refrigerator regenerators and coefficient of refrigeration, respectively. It is expected this work will guide the design of the experimental setup in the future. According to the simulation results, a total cooling capacity of 5.8 kW and a coefficient of performance of 0.48 can be obtained with an ambient temperature of 50◦C, a heating temperature of 300◦C and a cooling temperature of 10◦C. © 2023 Science Press. All rights reserved.