Performance Analysis of Thermoacoustic Refrigerator of 10 W Cooling Power made up of Poly-Vinyl-Chloride for Different Parallel Plate Stacks by using Helium as a Working Fluid

Abstract

Refrigerants are usually provided in the conventional refrigeration system although the refrigerants produce Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and Hydro-chlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which are hazardous to the environment. However, these disadvantages can be overcome by using air or inert gas in the thermoacoustic refrigeration system. In the present experimental work, helium is used as a working gas with an operating pressure range of 0.2 MPa to 1.0 MPa in order to study the performance of thermoacoustic refrigerator (TAR) which is fabricated using Poly-Vinyl-Chloride (PVC). The parallel plate stacks with different porosity ratios have been considered to study the performance of TAR. The temperature difference between the hot and cold heat exchanger and acoustic dynamic pressure were recorded by using Bruel and Kjaer data acquisition system under different operating conditions. The effect of different operating parameters such as operating frequency (200 Hz to 600 Hz), cooling load (2 W to 10 W) and drive ratio (0.6% to 1.6%) have also been considered to study the performance of TAR. The TAR also modeled in DeltaEC software and the results are compared with the experimental outcomes and found to be in good agreement. The experimental results show that −2.1°C is the lowest temperature measured at cold heat exchanger by achieving the highest temperature difference of about 32.9°C. An improvement is around 36% as compared to that of previous experiments that used aluminium TAR. The highest Coefficient of Performance (COP) and the Relative Coefficient of Performance (COPR) are found to be 2.024 and 0.217 respectively.