Heat driven thermoacoustic cooler based on traveling–standing wave

This paper presents a heat driven thermoacoustic cooler system without any moving part. It consists of a thermoacoustic engine and a thermoacoustic cooler, and the former is the driving source of the latter. Both the engine and the cooler are located in one loop tube coupled with a resonator tube, and the acoustic power produced by the engine is used to drive the cooler directly. Both regenerators of the engine and the cooler are located in the near region of the pressure antinode, and operate in traveling–standing wave phase region. In the engine’s regenerator, both components of the standing wave and the traveling wave realize the conversion from heat to acoustic energy. This improves the efficiency of the engine. In the cooler’s regenerator, both components of the traveling wave and the standing wave pump heat from the cold end. This improves the efficiency of the cooler. At the operating point with a mean pressure of 22 bar, helium as working gas, a frequency of 234 Hz, and a heating power of 300 W, the experimental cooler provides a no-load temperature of −30 °C and a cooling power of 40 W at the cooling temperature of 0 °C. The total length of this cooler system is less than 1 m, which shows a good prospect for the domestic cooler system in room-temperature cooling such as food refrigeration and air-conditioning.