Simulation Studies on the Standing and Traveling Wave Thermoacoustic Prime Movers

Thermoacoustic systems have been a focus of recent research due to its structural simplicity, high reliability due to absence of moving parts, and can be driven by low grade energy such as fuel, gas, solar energy, waste heat etc. There has been extensive research on both standing wave and traveling wave systems. Towards the development of such systems, simulations can be carried out by several methods such as (a) solving the energy equation, (b) enthalpy flow model, (c) DeltaEC, a free software available from LANL, USA (d) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) etc. We present here the simulation studies of standing wave and traveling wave thermoacoustic prime movers using CFD and DeltaEC. The CFD analysis is carried out using Fluent 6.3.26, incorporating the necessary boundary conditions with different working fluids at different operating pressures. The results obtained by CFD are compared with those obtained using DeltaEC. Also, the CFD simulation of the thermoacoustically driven refrigerator is presented.