Performance Evaluation of Ceramic Substrates for Cooling Applications in Thermo-acoustic Refrigerators

Thermo-acoustic refrigerators have recently drawn more attentions because of its eco-friendlier potential to address the current environmental issues resulting from the use of traditional vapour compression refrigerators. This paper aims at evaluating different selected ceramic substrates, with square pores, from the point of view of their performance as stack materials in the design of thermo-acoustic standing wave refrigerators. A 465 mm standing wave thermo-acoustic refrigerator was designed using numerical approximation provided by a modeling code called DELTAEC (Design Environment for Low-amplitude Thermo-Acoustic Energy Conversion). The design developed focuses in particular, on the effects of different ceramic substrate configurations (diameter, length, porosity and position) on the performance of the device. Meaningful comparison on the effect of the ceramic substrates configuration is provided in order to assess the performance of the device. Guidance on the identification and the selection of the best geometrical configurations of ceramic substrates are the main contributions of this work.