Today cooling technologies are going through a transformation phase. The advent of ozone layer depletion and global warming caused by the use of synthetic refrigerants has necessitated a search for alternative cooling technologies. Out of the several technologies which are emerging as alternatives, one technology that can provide cost effective refrigeration without using any of the environment degrading refrigerants is the thermoacoustic refrigeration system. Ideally, this device can be powered by a thermo acoustic Stirling heat engine which results in a system that can run on waste heat and does not contain refrigerants or moving parts. In the current study, experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the thermoacoustic refrigerating system when subjected to various operating conditions. The temperature difference between the hot end and the cold end of the stack ranged from 0 C to 15 C. The cooling load was controlled using resistance heating in place of the cold side heat exchanger. Results from this study show that the cooling load increases with the temperature difference between the two ends of the stack. It is also found that high pressure alone in the system does not necessarily result in a higher cooling temperature difference and thus a higher cooling load. For the thermoacoustic refrigerating system, there exists for a given frequency, an optimum pressure that results in the maximum temperature difference which in turn results in the possible maximum cooling load. Keywords: Thermoacoustic refrigeration, Cooling load, Refrigeration system
