Design and construction of a traveling wave thermoacoustic refrigerator

A traveling wave thermoacoustic refrigerator was designed, constructed, and tested. This refrigerator was composed of a linear motor, a branched tube, and a looped tube. A regenerator, composed of many screen meshes, was installed inside the looped tube. When the linear motor delivers an acoustic wave to the branched and looped tubes, heat pumping occurs along the regenerator. In this work, the regenerator radius and position were numerically optimized and the performance of the optimized refrigerator was measured. At the optimized values of regenerator radius and position, the refrigerator achieves a minimum cold temperature of 232 K and about 20% of the Carnot coefficient of performance at 265 K.