Practical issues in adopting a traveling wave thermoacoustic cooler for use in a food storage refrigerator

Abstract

CFIC/QDrive has developed a food storage refrigerator for the Army based on thermoacoustic technology. This ‘‘Phase II’’ SBIR project is a continuation of a ‘‘Phase I’’ effort that explored using a standing-wave thermoacoustic cooler for the refrigerator. The standing-wave cooler was found to be too inefficient with too low a power density to be practical, so it was switched to an acoustic Stirling, or traveling-wave thermoacoustic (regenerator based) cooler for Phase II. The major challenges of this project were adapting the Stirling-style cooler to a food storage application, and not the fundamentals of the cooler itself (the one exception being the issue of acoustic streaming). The challenges include: Running at 60 Hz (without frequency-shifting electronics), heat exchange without circulating fluids, dynamic balance, guarantee of long life, efficiency, and compactness (power density). How these challenges were met and how they drove the design, in most cases away from what would be ideal for the cycle itself, will be discussed. Time permitting, how the additional pressure of low unit cost would affect this type of product development will also be discussed. [Research supported by the U. S. Army through a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.]