Design of a toroidal thermoacoustic prime mover

Abstract

The topic of this thesis is the design of a toroidal prime mover. The primary design tool is a MATLAB program based on a standing wave analysis of thermoacoustics. A conventional prime mover that has been well studied, was used for validating the program. DeltaE, a program developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for designing thermoacoustic engines, was also used as an auxiliary tool for validation test purposes. The validation suggested that the MATLAB program models the onset conditions of a conventional prime mover with fair accuracy. The program was then applied to a toroidal prime mover. A series of analyses were conducted on a toroidal prime mover to determine the influence of prime mover circumference, stack length, and duct radius. The final design calls for a 150 cm circumference, 2.54 cm duct radius, and 1.9 cm stack length. The contributions of this thesis are: (1) to develop and validate the MATLAB simulation program; (2) to provide a draft design for a toroidal prime mover for future research.