| A waste-heat driven refrigerator is designed and built, and the fluid flow generated therein is measured via Laser Doppler Anemometry. The measured flow is resolved into acoustic and streaming modes. The acoustic mode measurements are compared to DeltaE modeling, and the streaming mode measurements are utilized to estimate thermal losses to the system.; The fluid flows are measured to high detail and accuracy, revealing a previously unconsidered nonpropagating mode of approximately half the magnitude of the planar acoustics. Furthermore, atypical streaming magnitudes compared to prior research are discovered. Whereas in earlier works, streaming has been measured as a lesser quantity of the acoustics, the flows in the experimental device are up to twice the acoustic amplitude in magnitude.; An analysis of the streaming behavior is focused on the generation of driving forces. It is shown that the forces generated by an evanescent mode in a tube gives evidence of streaming magnitudes of an order of magnitude greater than conventional theory for planar acoustic streaming in a tube, providing a possible explanation for the unprecedented streaming flows discovered.; Heat and work flows are measured within the device. Overall performance efficiencies relative to Carnot are used in determining the losses attributable to streaming flows. These calculations indicate that thermoacoustic devices operating under the additional loss of streaming are significantly less efficient than their plane-wave counterparts. The analysis of nonzero streaming through a thermoacoustic stack is shown to detrimentally affect the efficiency of the stack by altering the temperature gradient to unusable profiles for thermoacoustics. This results in a significant viscous loss to the system, and overall reduced efficiency.; It is concluded that while thermoacoustic devices are often modeled and experimented in the laboratory scale, without proper care to prevent streaming modes from developing said models may not adequately reflect the reality of the industrial scale device. |
