Analysis and Experiment of Heat Conduction and Heat Pumping in a Thermo-Acoustic Refrigerator Stack

열음향 냉동기 스택에서의 열전도와 열펌핑의 해석 및 실험

A loud speaker-driven zero-c.o.p. thermoacoustic refrigerator where an automotive catalytic converter is utilized as a stack has been fabricated and investigated experimentally. Without any heat exchangers at both ends of stack(and thus with zero c. o. p.), temperatures on the stack are measured and various heat transfer rates are calculated from the measured temperatures. Temperatures on the stack have been also calculated numerically using a finite difference method. The measured temperatures are in fair agreement with the calculated temperatures for lower frequency than 300Hz, however, the former deviates from the latter considerably for higher frequency. Two types of c. o. p. have been defined as appropriate to the experiment. While the nominal c. o. p. is zero(the condition in which the pumped heat flow rate in the pore exactly cancels the axial heat conduction down the stack), the true c. o. p. is found to be about 0.14 for 300Hz from the experiments.