Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thermoacoustic Engine
One of our objectives in thermoacoustics research is to develop efficient miniature power systems based on thermoacoustic engines. A schematic, photograph, and video clip of our small-scale engine demonstrator are shown below. The resonator is made of copper tubes and a ceramic stack holder. Reticulated vitreous carbon (RVC) is applied as a stack. Copper mesh screens placed on both sides of the stack serve as heat exchangers. The heat is suppleid either by flame or an electric heater. A water-cooling jacket is arranged at the cold part of the engine. The system is equipped with a pressure transducer measuring acoustic pressure inside the resonator and two thermocouples measuring temperatures at the stack ends. This engine-demonstrator generates sound at temperature difference about 200 degrees Celsius. The sound amplitude reach values of 2 kPa. In the future, we plan to optimize this concept for thermal-to-electric energy conversion. An electroacoustic transformer will be added. We hope to reduce temperature differences to about 50 degrees and reach overall efficiencies about 5-10%. (Typical efficiencies of other types of centimer-scale energy conversion systems are around 1%.)
www.mme.wsu.edu/~matveev/tae.htm
1/3
3/27/13
Thermoacoustic Engine
Short video
Featured Articles: Matveev, K.I. and Jung, S., 2011, Modeling of Thermoacoustic Resonators with Non-Uniform Medium and Boundary Conditions, ASME Journal of Vibration and Acoustics, 133(3), 031012, pp. 1-7.
www.mme.wsu.edu/~matveev/tae.htm 2/3
3/27/13
Thermoacoustic Engine
Jung, S. and Matveev, K.I., 2010, Study of Small-Scale Standing-Wave Thermoacoustic Engine, Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 224(1), pp. 133-141. Matveev, K.I., Wekin, A., Richards, C.D., and Shafiei-Tehrany, N., 2007, On the Coupling between Standing-Wave Thermoacoustic Engine and Piezoelectric Transducer, International Mechanical Engineering Congress, Seattle, WA, ASME paper IMECE200741119.
www.mme.wsu.edu/~matveev/tae.htm
3/3