Experimental Study on the Basic Characteristics of the Thermoacoustic Prime Mover.

A thermoacoustic refrigerator and a thermoacoustic prime mover, because of its simple structure, would serve as very desirable systems, because thermoacoustic prime movers can be driven with waste heat, such as exhaust gas from engines, or with the heat from natures such as sunlight and geothermal heat. The combined thermoacoustic refrigerator and prime mover system would become a perfect cooling system without moving parts, CFCs, and HFCs. Thus this “Thermoacoustic-driven Thermoacoustic Refrigerator” will be a candidate for the next-generation refrigeration systems. In this paper, we set up our thermoacoustic prime mover to investigate the fundamental characteristics. On the prime mover tests, the fundamental characteristics of stack dimensions are mainly checked and the condition of the oscillation generation is observed with the instantaneous measurement of temperature and pressure oscillation. The way to improve the thermal efficiency of the prime mover is mentioned in terms of the operating condition.