Numerical Simulation of a Thermo-Acoustic Refrigerator

Abstract

A thermoacoustic device consists of two main components: (1) a resonance tube where the flow is characterized by length scales of the order of the acoustic wavelength, and (2) a stack of plates which are separated by distances much smaller than the acoustic wavelength. This effort focuses on the development of numerical schemes which overcome this scale disparity in an efficient manner. Two approaches are discussed in the paper. The first is a multiple-pressure-variable approach that is suitable for the simulation of resonance tube acoustics and for analyzing interactions between heat addition and long waves. The second is a multi-dimensional model of the stack region which is based on fast solution of the zero-Mach-number conservation equations.