A pistonless Stirling cooler

We demonstrate a prototype acoustic cooler that uses Stirling cycles executed by a traveling wave with high acoustic impedance thermoacoustically induced in a looped tube. The tube has no moving parts, only a pair of stacks sandwiched between two heat exchangers: one amplifies the acoustic power and the amplified wave supplies the driving energy to pump heat directly within the second stack. Because it uses extremely simple hardware consisting of a few parts, the cooling device is potentially a powerful tool for applications such as conventional cooling systems. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.