Application of the porous media approach to a Standing Wave Thermoacoustic Engine for CFD simulations

Abstract

In this article, an application of the macroscopic porous media approach, suitable for CFD simulations in oscillating flows, is proposed for a simplified Standing Wave Thermo-Acoustic Engine (SWTAE), composed of a hot buffer tube, a stack - where the energy conversion takes place - and the rest of the resonator. While for a Travelling Wave Thermo-Acoustic Engine (TWTAE) a macroscopic model for porous media has been successfully applied to both regenerators (similar to the stack in a SWTA) and heat exchangers, for SWTAE this is not true. The results illustrate that a Local-Thermal Non-Equilibrium model is required to start up the SWTAE, otherwise (with the Local Thermal Equilibrium model) the thermoacoustic instability cannot arise. Furthermore, the comparison between the simulation conducted at the microscopic scale and that one at the macroscopic level, depicts that a purely Darcy-linear model employed for the macroscopic model, characterized for oscillating flows, overpredicts the pressure amplitude at periodic steady-state. For this reason, a Forchheimer-like coefficient needs to be implemented to fit the macroscopic solution with the microscopic one.