2008

SCIENCE IN CHINA PRESS

Springer

A 100 W-class traveling-wave thermoacoustic

electricity generator

BRIEF COMMUNICATION

Chinese Science Bulletin

LUO ErCang1, WU ZhangHua1, DAI Wei1, LI ShanFeng1,2 & ZHOU Yuan1

1
2

Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China;
Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Experimental investigation on a traveling-wave thermoacoustic electricity generator is presented. In the

experiment, more than 100 W electrical power was achieved under 2.5 MPa mean pressure, 64 Hz
working frequency and 0.2 MPa pressure amplitude.

A thermoacoustic electricity generator (TAEG) is a

novel heat-to-electrical power transduction technology
developed in recent years. It mainly consists of two
subsystems: a thermoacoustic heat engine (TAHE) and a
linear alternator (LA). The thermoacoustic heat engine is
used to convert heat to acoustic power (i.e. mechanical
power), and the linear alternator is used to convert
acoustic power to electrical power. Compared with other
heat-to-electrical power generation technologies, the
TAEG has prominent advantages. Firstly, it can use
various energy sources including solar energy, industrial
waste heat and so on; secondly, it can achieve high
heat-to-electricity transduction efficiency, with power
scale from tens of Watts to hundreds of kilowatts; thirdly,
it has high reliability, environmental friendliness, etc.
Thus, this technology is getting more and more attention.
The TAHE has been investigated for about 40 years,
and the investigation started from standing-wave type to
traveling-wave type. Due to the irreversible thermodynamic process caused by imperfect heat exchange in
thermoacoustic stack, the standing-wave thermoacoustic
heat engine (SWTAHE) has a relatively low efficiency[1].
However, the traveling-wave thermoacoustic heat engine
(TWTAHE) can achieve high efficiency as the Carnot
cycle due to the perfect heat exchange in the regenerator[2]. Therefore, the TWTAHE is getting more attraction

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in recent years. In 1999, Backhaus and Swift[3] from Los

Alamos National laboratory (LANL) successfully developed a TWTAHE with an acoustical power of about
710 W and a maximum thermal efficiency of 0.3, which
could be comparable to the conventional internal combustion engine. In 2005, Luo et al.[4] proposed an energy-focused TWTAHE that uses a tapered resonance
tube to reduce nonlinear dissipation loss which commonly exists in an iso-diameter resonance tube. This
approach efficiently enhanced the pressure ratio and the
thermal efficiency. Moreover, the net output acoustic
power (acoustic power in the resonance tube was not
included) reached 451 W[5]. So far, the TWTAHEs have
reached very high level in both thermal efficiency and
acoustic power, and have provided an efficient way to
convert heat to mechanical power.
Nowadays, acoustic power produced by the thermoacoustic heat engines has mainly been used to drive
the traveling-wave thermoacoustic refrigerators[6] and
pulse tube cryocoolers[7] which are aimed at room temperature cooling and cryogenic cooling, respectively. As
a matter of fact, utilization of the acoustic power can be
widely expanded to other fields including thermoacousReceived August 21, 2007; accepted October 24, 2007
doi: 10.1007/s11434-008-0200-1

Corresponding author (email: ecluo@cl.cryo.ac.cn)

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.
50536040 and 50625620)

Chinese Science Bulletin | May 2008 | vol. 53 | no. 9 | 1453-1456

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF ENERGY SOURCES

traveling-wave thermoacoustic heat engine, linear alternator, heat-acoustic-electrical transduction

tic electricity generation, where the TAEG technology is

expected to have much space of development. Two ways
of thermoacoustic electricity generation have been developed in the past decades: one is magneto-hydrodynamic type, and the other is linear alternator type. The
former uses liquid metal as the working fluid of the
thermoacoustic engine in a magnetic field to produce
electricity[8]. However, this technology is still under investigation. The latter uses a linear alternator which can
be driven by the thermoacoustic engine to convert
acoustic power to electrical power. Under the financial
support of NASA, Northrop Grumman Space and Technology and LANL firstly conducted on the travelingwave thermoacoustic electricity generator (TWTAEG)
which can provide a novel electricity generation technology for power source of deep space exploration[9].
Their electrical power generation system consisting of a
TWTAHE and a LA could give 39 W at 18% heat-toelectrical transduction efficiency and 50 W at 15% efficiency.
Based on our experience and understanding in the
technology, the phase coupling between the LA and the
TWTAHE is very important on the system performance
of TWTAEG. In the LA, the phase difference between
the pressure amplitude p and the volume velocity U at
the piston front face can be varied by changing resistance of load of the LA. According to the computational
results, the phase angle (p leading U) can be changed
from 90 to 90 and the LA will operate efficiently

with a 0 phase angle. On the other hand, the phase angle between p and U is about 80 to 90 at the outlet of
the TWTAHE loop. In the TWTAHE mentioned above,
the loop connects with a resonance tube which has
nearly 90 phase angle at its inlet and can provide sufficient volume velocity needed by the loop. Without the
resonance tube, the phase angle and volume velocity of
the LA should match the TWTAHE loop for operation.
However, the LA and TWTAHE used in our experiment
did not match each other because the TWTAHE loop
had a large volume velocity at the outlet under the
normal operation (pressure ratio of 1.1 to 1.2) while the
maximum swept volume of the LA was only about 10
cm3 and the allowable volume velocity was only
one-fourth of that of the loop. It was also verified in the
experiment, when the LA was simply connected to the
TWTAHE without resonance tube, the system did not
work even when the heating temperature was above
650. Therefore the resonance tube was still used to
perform the match between the LA and TWTAHE in our
experiment.
Figure 1 is the schematic of the experimental setup of
the TWTAEG, which contains an energy-focused
TWTAHE and a LA. The TASHE loop is about 2 m long
with an 80 mm inner diameter and successively consists
of a feedback tube, a main ambient heat exchanger, a
regenerator, a heater block, a thermal buffer tube, and a
secondary ambient heat exchanger [4]. The movingmagnet type LA is a dual-opposed configuration to

Figure 1 Schematic of the TWTAEG.

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LUO ErCang et al. Chinese Science Bulletin | May 2008 | vol. 53 | no. 9 | 1453-1456

Figure 2 Output electrical power and piston displacement amplitude of

the LA vs. acoustical pressure amplitude of the LA.

BRIEF COMMUNICATION
Figure 3 Heating temperature of the TWTAHE vs. input pressure amplitude of the LA.

close to the experimental data, so the piston displacement can be estimated from computational data, which
is given in Figure 2. In Figure 3, the heating temperature
of the TWTAHE is also presented. From the two figures,
it can be concluded that the piston displacement and the
output electrical power and the heating temperature of
the engine decrease while the input pressure amplitude
of the LA increases, as the resistance of the rheostat decreases.
Here, we can estimate the efficiency of the system.
For example, when the resistance is 100 , the measured electrical power is 97 W. Meanwhile, the acoustic
power converted by the LA is 126 W, so the acoustic-to-electrical power is about 0.77. However, due to
large dissipation in the resonance tube, the efficiency of
the whole system is still low. According to linear thermoacoustic theory[10], the acoustic power dissipated by
resonance tube is about 410 W from calculation under
0.2 MPa pressure amplitude. This value is probably underestimated because the linear thermoacoustic theory is
based on acoustical approximation. In fact, the real
acoustic power dissipated by the resonance tube is much
larger than 410 W because of the turbulent flow under
this working condition. In the future, a high efficiency of
the whole system could be achieved by using a large
linear alternator to match the TWTAHE and by eliminating the resonator in the meantime.
We would like to thank Prof. Zhan Wenshan from the State Key Laboratory
of Magnetism, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof.
Wu Jianfeng from Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese
Academy of Sciences for the illuminative discussions.

LUO ErCang et al. Chinese Science Bulletin | May 2008 | vol. 53 | no. 9 | 1453-1456

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF ENERGY SOURCES

eliminate vibration, whose rating power is about 200 W,

piston area is 6.7 cm2 and maximum displacement is 5
mm. The left-side motor has a mechanical-electrical
transduction coefficients of 52 N/A, a moving mass of
0.45 kg, a nature resonant frequency of 45 Hz and a
mechanical damping coefficient of 3.14 N/s; the
right-side motor has almost the same parameters as the
left-side one. The LA was connected to the TWTAHE
by an 1 m-long and 50 mm-diameter straight tube to
amplify the pressure amplitude at the loop outlet, which
can reduce the resonators losses by decreasing the
pressure amplitude in the engine while maintains the
same pressure amplitude in the LA.
Figure 2 gives the output electrical power and piston
displacement of the LA as a function of the pressure
amplitude at its inlet. The hollow points connected by
dashed line are computational data while the solid points
connected by solid line are experimental results. Helium
with 2.5 MPa mean pressure was used as the working
gas and the working frequency was 64 Hz. A rheostat
was connected with the LA as electrical load. The electrical power could be calculated by measuring the voltage and current of the rheostat. Under 2800 W heating
power, different output electrical power could be obtained by varying the resistance of the rheostat. When
Z = 100 , 97 W electrical power was obtained in the
experiment. When the input power was increased to
2850 W and up, more than 100 W was achieved. Meanwhile, the current might exceed the limit of 1 A and the
piston displacement also could exceed the limit of 5 mm.
To avoid the damage to the LA, the resistance of the
rheostat was not reduced to below 100 . From Figure
2, it can be found that the computational data is very

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2001

Science in China Series F: Information Sciences

EDITOR
YANG Fuqing
Department of Computer Science & Technology
Peking University
Beijing 100871, China

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