Experimental Performance Evaluation of Thermoacoustic Refrigerator made up of Poly-Vinyl-Chloride for different Parallel Plate Stacks using Air as a working medium

Abstract

Abstract Most of the experimental work carried out by fabricating Aluminium and other metallic resonator system in order to evaluate the performance of thermoacoustic refrigerator. In this experimental work, poly-vinyl-chloride has been used to fabricate all the structural parts including the resonator system to study the performance of thermoacoustic refrigerator for different operating conditions. Three parallel plate stacks are fabricated by using Aluminum and the Mylar sheet material of 0.12 mm thickness by considering three different porosity ratios. In this research work, only pure air is used as a working fluid. The experiments are conducted for the drive ratios ranging from 0.6% to 1.6% with an operating frequency varies from 200Hz to 600Hz with a step of 100 Hz. Also, the mean operating pressure and cooling load varies from 2 to 10 bar and 2 to 10 W respectively. In this work, Bruel and Kjaer data acquisition system and RTDs are used to measure and record the temperature difference between two heat exchangers. The effect of different parameters such as operating pressure, operating frequency, cooling load and drive ratios on the performance of thermoacoustic refrigerator in terms of temperature difference and coefficient of performance (COP) are studied.It is observed from experimental results that 1.23 oC is the lowest measured temperature at the cold heat exchanger by maintaining 32 oC at the hot heat exchanger. It is important to note that 30.77 oC is the highest value of temperature difference measured between two sides of stack, which is about 41% improvement in the temperature difference as compared to previous findings