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Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China;
Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
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
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LUO ErCang et al. Chinese Science Bulletin | May 2008 | vol. 53 | no. 9 | 1453-1456
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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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2001
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LUO ErCang et al. Chinese Science Bulletin | May 2008 | vol. 53 | no. 9 | 1453-1456