A heat-driven thermoacoustic cryocooler capable of reaching below liquid hydrogen temperature

A "double-gas acoustic amplifier" is introduced to couple a thermoacoustic heat engine and a two-stage pulse tube cooler in this paper. Compared with previous acoustic amplifiers, this new acoustic amplifier maintains the function of amplification for pressure amplitude. In particular, the novel acoustic amplifier with a reservoir makes it possible to install an acoustic transparent but gas blocking elastic membrane between the engine and the cooler. Thus, the engine can use nitrogen as the working gas to work at low frequency; and meanwhile, the cooler can still use helium as the working gas to maintain its high performance. With this new amplifier, the cooling temperature of a two-stage pulse tube cooler driven by an energy-focused thermoacoustic engine reached 18.7 K.     

A 300 Hz high frequency thermoacoustically driven pulse tube cooler

This article introduces the latest progress of a 300 Hz thermoacousUcally driven pulse tube cooler. Based on the experience of former experiments, improvements have been made in the standing-wave engine, pulse tube cooler and their coupling mechanism. An inlet pressure ratio of 1.248 was obtained with the mean pressure and heating power of 4.13 MPa and 1760 W, respectively. A lowest no-load temperature of 69.5 K has been reached under this condition. This is the first time for thermoacoustically driven pulse tube coolers to reach the temperature below 70 K with such a high frequency.     

High efficiency linear compressor driven pulse tube cryocooler operating in liquid nitrogen temperature

The inertance tube is one of the key components of a pulse tube cryocooler. It has great influence not only on the efficiency of the pulse tube cryocooler, but also on the efficiency of the linear compressor. Meanwhile, it is very difficult to predict the impedance of an inertance tube because of the turbulent flow. In this paper, using a quasi-turbulent model, the inertance tube is optimized to match a linear compressor driven pulse tube cryocooler. Experimental results show that this model can predict the impedance quite well. With 127 W input electric power, the pulse tube cryocooler obtains 9.4 W cooling power at a temperature of 77 K. The relative Carnot efficiency of the whole system reaches 19.8%.     

Experimental investigation of a 500 W traveling-wave thermoacoustic electricity generator

In this paper, an experimental investigation of a traveling-wave thermoacoustic electricity generator, which consists of a traveling-wave thermoacoustic heat engine and a linear alternator driven by that engine, is presented. Using the results of previous theoretical and experimental research, we designed and fabricated a traveling-wave thermoacoustic heat engine and a linear alternator. In the experiments, 450.9 W of electrical power was obtained with a maximum thermal-to-electrical efficiency of 15.03%, and a maximum electrical power of 481.0 W was achieved with 12.65% thermal-to-electrical efficiency.     

A 100 W-class traveling-wave thermoacoustic electricity generator

Experimental investigation on a traveling-wave thermoacoustic electricity generator is presented. In the experiment, more than 100 W electrical power was achieved under 2.5 MPa mean pressure, 64 Hz working frequency and 0.2 MPa pressure amplitude.