Design of a Thermoacoustic Electric Generator

Abstract

We have designed a thermoacoustic electric generator consisting of a looped tube thermoacoustic engine and a voice-coil type electric generator in place of an acoustic resonator. To attain a better performance, the diameter of regenerators and heat exchangers were changed from 23 mm to 36 mm, based on the calculation results using the result of the thermoacoustic theory. We used one of two types of the secondary heat exchangers: parallel-fin type and shell-and-tube type. We obtained 18.1W output and efficiency reached 2.9%. This result is more than twice as large as the original one built by Obayashi.