EFFECT OF DIFFERENT HEAT EXCHANGERS ON THE WASTE-HEAT DRIVEN THERMOACOUSTIC ENGINE

Abstract

To enhance the efficiency of the SCORE thermoacoustic engine, it is important to investigate the heat transfer between the bulge or theconvolution and the regenerator. Heat transfer due to convection has greatinfluence on performance of the thermoacoustic engine. The total heat transfer from the bulge or the convolution to the first few layers of the regenerator is mainly due to convection and radiation. In this paper, the two modes of heat transfers, convection and radiation are under investigation numerically. The main objective of the present study is to find an ideal shape of the bulge which transports heat from the cooking stove to regenerator. Four different designs of the bulge are proposed in this work. Numerical method FluentTM CFD modelling with surface to surface (S2S) radiation method is chosen to study the radiation effect. The main challenge in the development of the models of such system is to simulate the coupled heat transfer effect and the temperature gradient across both the bulge and porous media surfaces. The results show a very limited amount of heat transfer by convection on all the bulge simulated cases, with a dominant radiative heat transfer over the convective heat transfer while convection was found to be dominant in the convolution simulated case. By looking at the heat fluxes solely, convolution design is recommended to improve the engine performance as it possesses higher total heat flux comparatively but most of it was found to be by convection rather than radiation. The results were validated analytically in a recent accepted paper and found to be in good agreement. To accurately predict the heat transfer in the model, conduction must also be included in future studies as well

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