Abstract In the last two decades a new refrigeration technology emerged: thermoacoustic refrigeration. Its most promising feature is the environmentally friendly performance, since thermoacoustic refrigerators do not rely on hazardous refrigerants. Although thermoacoustic refrigerators can achieve a substantial fraction of Carnot’s efficiency, they are not yet competitive to commercially available refrigerators. A reason for this is that most research reported in literature was done to understand the fundamental physics and thermodynamics underlying thermoacoustics by developing and evaluating simplified models. At this time, little is known about the flow structure and heat transfer mechanisms in the thermoacoustic stack with its attached heat exchangers, which are key parts of a thermoacoustic refrigerator. In order to investigate experimentally these flow structures and heat transfer mechanisms, we designed a thermoacoustic refrigerator model. During the course of our design we found that in spite of the large amount of information available in literature, a paper summarizing design guidelines based on available theory is still missing. This motivated us to prepare this review article, in which we summarize design steps, provide guidelines for designers and point out areas in which more research is required.
Herman et al. (Sun,) studied this question.