Abstract
Abstract Thermoacoustics (TA) deals with the conversion of heat into sound and vice versa. The device that transfers energy from a low-temperature reservoir to a high-temperature one by utilizing acoustic work is called TA cooler (TAC). The main components of a typical TAC are a resonator, a porous regenerator (e.g., stack of parallel plates), and two heat exchangers. The thermoacoustic phenomenon takes place in the regenerator where a nonzero temperature gradient is imposed and interacts with the sound wave. The low temperature at the cold end of TAC can be used to condense water from the humid air and also reduce the moisture. In the current study, the sound wave with high intensity was produced to drive a TAC to produce cooling power at a cold temperature around 18 °C, using saturated water vapor as the working fluid. The drainage of condensate in the regenerator is the key to the system’s performance. This work is dedicated to investigate the effect from temperature gradient created in TAC on the condensation enhancement, by adopting three different designs of regenerators. A 3D printer was used to design and fabricate different structures of regenerator, and then, the systematic cooling capacity was tested and compared with different regenerators. This work can be extended to evaluate how the TA effect can be affected by the condensation if humid air is directly used as the working fluid. The potential application of this investigation can be an autonomous TAC system for water harvesting in arid areas.
Highlights
Thermoacoustic devices utilize acoustic waves to pump heat from one place to another or contrariwise creates an acoustic wave from the applied temperature gradient
One of the categories of such TA devices is thermoacoustic engine (TAE), which converts the heat to acoustic power, many applications about TAE can be found in the literature, such as cascade TAE [1], the heterogeneous porous stack in TAE [2], or small-scale α-Type TAE [3]
It is expected that a system containing TAE that utilizes the heat from solar energy coupled with a TA cooler (TAC) that utilizes the acoustic wave generated from TAE to create a temperature gradient, has a great potential to be used for autonomous atmospheric water harvesting in humid areas, if the humid air is used as the working fluid, so that the water extraction process is more thermodynamic efficient and more controllable
Summary
Thermoacoustic devices utilize acoustic waves to pump heat from one place to another or contrariwise creates an acoustic wave from the applied temperature gradient. It is expected that a system containing TAE that utilizes the heat from solar energy coupled with a TAC that utilizes the acoustic wave generated from TAE to create a temperature gradient (cold end side with a temperature close to saturation temperature), has a great potential to be used for autonomous atmospheric water harvesting in humid areas (such as south Texas and Florida), if the humid air is used as the working fluid, so that the water extraction process is more thermodynamic efficient and more controllable. If the working fluid is humid air and the cold end temperature reaches the saturation temperature, condensation will occur on the surface of stack in the TAC. Spacing between plates (ssstack) Half spacing (y0) Porosity of the stack (Bstack) Normalized thermal penetration depth (δkn)
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