Thermoacoustic seperation phenomena of the resonator with mixture working gases

A 2-D numerical model has been developed to study the thermoacoustic separation effect of the resonator in this paper. Computation methods based on the compressible SIMPLE algorithm are proposed to solve the velocity field, temperature field of the resonator. Then the concentration field of certain component which comprises the mixture can be attained on the basis of the former velocity and temperature solution. It is shown that the light component and heavy one can be pumped to the pressure node and antinode separately by thermoacoustic effect and thermal diffusion effect, which results in seperation of the mixture along the propagation direction of sound wave. Then the resonators with 5 diameters have been simulated to study the influence of radial concentration distribution of the mixture working gases. The influence range of the radial concentration boundary layer and the seperation ratio in different diameter tubes are detailed investigated. Finally, results reveal that the optimal diameter of the resonator will be about sixteen times more than the concentration penetration depth of the working gases.