Share

Design and dynamic behaviour of a cold storage system combined with a solar powered thermoacoustic refrigerator.

Author(s) : PERIER-MUZET M., BEDECARRATS J. P., STOUFFS P., et al.

Type of article: Article

Summary

A heat powered thermoacoustic refrigerator consists in a thermoacoustic engine that produces acoustic work utilizing heat, coupled to a thermoacoustic cooler that converts this acoustic energy into cooling effect. These machines have already proved their capability in laboratory or in space refrigeration. Previous studies have also demonstrated the possibility of using concentrated solar energy as thermal energy sources for low power heat driven thermoacoustic refrigerators. As other solar refrigeration systems, even if the cooling demand generally increases with the intensity of the solar radiation, one of the major difficulties is to insure a frigorific power supply when there is no, or low, solar radiation. The aim of this work is to study a kW scale solar thermoacoustic refrigerator capable to reach temperatures of the industrial refrigeration domain. This refrigerator is combined with a latent cold storage in order to guarantee a sufficient cooling capacity to face to refrigeration loads in spite of the production fluctuations. A description of the studied prototype is done and the model developed to describe the transient behaviour of the main components of this machine is introduced. The results obtained with a simulation of one week with real solar radiations are presented and the behaviour and the energetic performances of the entire system are analysed. Finally the impact of the sizing of the cold storage system is discussed. With the best storage design, the system is capable to supply a cooling power of 400 W at a temperature equal or lower than -20°C with an average Coefficient Of Performance of the solar thermoacoustic refrigerator equal to 21%.

Details

  • Original title: Design and dynamic behaviour of a cold storage system combined with a solar powered thermoacoustic refrigerator.
  • Record ID : 30011410
  • Languages: English
  • Source: Applied Thermal Engineering - vol. 68 - n. 1-2
  • Publication date: 2014/07
  • DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2014.03.065

Links


See other articles in this issue (4)
See the source

Indexing