Thermoacoustic Refrigerator

What is a thermoacoustic refrigerator? Succinctly, it's a heat pump cycle that uses sound to drive a pressure (and by extension temperature) gradient. As a project lead for my IEEE-HKN chapter's inaugural projects program, I spearheaded the design and fabrication of one of these fridges. 

I developed a full structural assembly in Onshape and manufactured the prototype on a limited budget with the intention of using it to validate our calculated theoretical cooling performance. 

In order to determine the correct resonant frequency of our internal geometry, we used ANSYS Fluent CFD. We were able to model the transient pressure distributions of the acoustic pressure waves at a given frequency, and through iteration we found the "optimal" frequency to stage our pressure nodes/antinodes across our heat stack. (This allowed us to circumvent calculating the acoustic impedance of our non-axisymmetric stack geometry).

Skills