Thermoacoustic refrigeration is an environmentally safe technology that uses sound energy to pump heat. It offers several benefits, which include use of environmentally safe working fluids, no significant moving parts, and continuous capacity control. The thermoacoustic process results from thermal interactions between the oscillating gas and the stack surfaces in the system. This paper reports on studies involving design, construction, operation, and experiments on the gasstack heat transfer in the system. The results show that the heat transfer and Streaming Reynolds number increase with drive ratio and that the stack plate losses significantly dominate the total energy loss. It was also found that for the parallel plate stack arrangement, the use of an advanced engineering thermoplastic stack material would significantly reduce the energy loss in the system compared to the stainless steel that has been favored in many studies.

Units: SI