Use of electrodynamic drivers in thermoacoustic refrigerators

Ray Scott Wakeland

Graduate Program in Acoustics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16804

Received 29 April 1999; accepted for publication 19 October 1999

Some issues involved in matching electrodynamic drivers to thermoacoustic refrigerators are
examined using an equivalent circuit model. Conclusions are that the driver should be chosen to
have a large product (Bl) 2 /(R e R m ); the suspension stiffness should be chosen to make the
combined impedance of the mechanical and acoustical parts of the system entirely real at the
operating frequency; and the piston area should be selected to maximize electroacoustic efficiency,
or other desired parameter, by matching the acoustic load to the optimum mechanical load for the
particular driver. Alternately, if the piston area is fixed, the operating frequency can be adjusted to
make this same match. 2000 Acoustical Society of America. S0001-49660000602-0
PACS numbers: 43.38.Dv, 43.35.Ud SLE

INTRODUCTION
The most common type of driver for use in thermoa-
coustic refrigeration applications is the ordinary electrody-
namic loudspeaker. This paper examines some of the issues
involved in matching an electrodynamic driver to a thermoa-
coustic refrigerator.
Most thermoacoustic refrigerators to date have had basic
structures similar to those schematically depicted in Fig. 1.
The driver is placed at the end of an acoustical resonator in
which it creates a standing wave, as in Fig. 1a. The back
side of the driver is enclosed. The rear enclosure confines the
working fluid often a pressurized mixture of helium and
argon and provides equal mean pressures on the front and
rear of the piston. This enclosed gas also provides a restoring
force to the piston in the form of a gas spring.
Thermoacoustic refrigerators contain a heat-pumping el-
ement, called a stack, that is flanked by heat exchangers
not shown. For best efficiency, stacks are usually placed
near pressure antinodes. In the example shown in Fig. 1b, a
volume is placed opposite the driver to act as an acoustic
compliance, approximating an open end. If the driving fre-
quency is chosen to make this a quarter-wavelength resona-
tor, then the driver is at a location of high acoustic imped-
ance, and the stack is placed near the driver the dashed line
is an approximate pressure amplitude profile. It is also pos-
sible to make resonators where the driver is at a position of
low acoustic impedance, as in Fig. 1c. Other arrangements
are possible,1 with the acoustic load seen by the face of the
piston somewhere within this range from large to small.
This paper examines the questions of how to select an
appropriate driver for a particular thermoacoustic applica-
tion, and how the requirements differ depending on whether
the driver is in a location of high or low impedance. The
results are that the driver should be chosen to have a large
product (Bl) 2 /(R e R m ), defined below; the suspension stiff-
ness should be chosen to make the combined impedance of
the mechanical and acoustical parts of the system entirely
real at the operating frequency; and the piston area should be
selected to maximize electroacoustic efficiency or other de-
sired parameter by matching the acoustic load to the opti-
mum mechanical load for the particular driver. Alternately, if
the piston area is fixed, the operating frequency can be ad-
justed to make this same match.
I. PHYSICAL MODEL AND EQUIVALENT CIRCUITS
The objective is to optimize the transfer of electrical
power to acoustic power in the resonator. Two cases are
considered. The first case is optimization of electroacoustic
efficiency, the likely desired operating condition for a prac-
tical, working refrigerator. The second case, maximization of
acoustic power in the resonator for maximum allowable elec-
trical current in the voice coil, might be preferred for a small
demonstration device.
The problem is analyzed using the simplified physical
model shown in Fig. 2. The driver is modeled in the ordinary
way, as a mass-spring-dashpot system driven by a coil of
length l in a magnet gap with induction B. In this paper, B
and l appear only as the force factor Bl, which is assumed to
be a purely real numbera typical situation prevailing
with conventional moving-coil transducers. 2 The piston
has mass M m and an area S that is not necessarily the same
as the cross-sectional area of the resonator at that end. The
mechanical compliance C m , related to the mechanical stiff-
ness k m by k m 1/C m , includes the suspension stiffness and
the effective spring constant of the gas in the enclosure. It is
assumed that the enclosure is small enough that wave effects
in the enclosure can be neglected at the low frequencies of
interest. The resonator has a complex acoustic impedance a
at the piston, the real part of which includes the dissipation
due to the stack, heat exchangers, and resonator.
An equivalent circuit3 of the simplified system is shown
in Fig. 3a. An e j t time dependence is assumed throughout
this paper. The electrical capacitance C e has been included
to allow for the possibility of adding a capacitor to improve
the power factor of the device. In Fig. 3b, all elements have
been brought through the transformers into the mechanical
mobility domain, with
X e L e 1/ C e , 1a
X m M m k m / , 1b
R a Re S 2 a , 1c
X a Im S a .
2
1d

827 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 107 (2), February 2000 0001-4966/2000/107(2)/827/6/$17.00 2000 Acoustical Society of America 827

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 FIG. 2. The simple physical model used in this analysis.

Using F a (R a jX a )u a and defining the total equiva-

lent input impedance of the circuit as Z T F e /u e , gives the
FIG. 1. a A typical thermoacoustic refrigerator comprises an acoustical form
resonator, a driver that creates a standing wave in the resonator, and a
smaller enclosure behind the driver that holds in the working fluid. b A
configuration that puts the driver at a pressure antinode. c An alternative
configuration that puts the driver at a pressure node. The dashed lines rep-

Re R a jX a u a u a*
Re F e F * *
e /Z T

Ra

ua 2
Re 1/Z T F e
. 3
resent the acoustic pressure swings.
Defining an equivalent mechanical reactance X of the me-
chanical and acoustic impedances as
The quantity E/(Bl) has been assigned the symbol u e be-
cause it has units of velocity. F a is the force on the piston XX m X a , 4
face due to the acoustical oscillations of the gas in the reso-
simplifies subsequent expressions. The total mechanical im-
nator, proportional to the pressure amplitude there; u a is the
pedance can be obtained from Fig. 4 by adding in parallel the
velocity of the piston.
three legs of the circuit,
Converting all elements into the mechanical impedance
domain results in Fig. 4. 1 Re jX e 1
The electroacoustic efficiency is the ratio of the time- , 5
Z T Bl 2 Bl 2 R m R a jX
averaged acoustic power to the time-averaged total input
power, so

Re F a u *
a
Re F e u e*
. 2
Re 1
ZT

Re
Bl 2
R m R a
R m R a 2 X 2
. 6

The ratio F e /u a is the impedance of the mechanical

The asterisk denotes complex conjugation, used here to fa- acoustical leg only, so
cilitate taking the time-average of quantities represented in
complex notation.
Fe 2
ua
R m R a 2 X 2 . 7

FIG. 3. Equivalent circuits for the physical model. Part a shows the electrical, mechanical, and acoustical parts of the system each in their respective
domains, linked by transformer elements. Part b represents the same system, but with all parts converted to equivalent mechanical mobility elements.

828 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 107, No. 2, February 2000 Ray S. Wakeland: Electrodynamic drivers in thermoacoustics 828

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FIG. 4. Equivalent circuit in the mechanical impedance domain.
Substituting these expressions into Eq. 3, the electroacous-
tic efficiency is found to be given by4
2
R eR m X 2
1 R eR m R m Ra Rm
1 1 . Bl 2
Bl 2 R a Rm Ra Bl 2 R m R a
8 R eR m
We would also like to find the conditions that will give
the greatest possible acoustic power in the resonator without
destroying the driver. One limit on the driver is the maxi-
mum current I max that can be sustained before the voice coil
burns up, so the case considered here is that of the time-
averaged acoustic power at maximum current, a (I max). Ex-
amination of Fig. 4 shows the acoustic power i.e., the power
in the resistive element R a to be
Re F a u *
a BlI max 2 Ra
a I max .
2 2 R m R a 2 X 2
The factor of 1/2 assumes the use of peak not root-mean-
square values for the amplitudes of oscillating variables
such as forces, velocities, and currents.
II. THE REACTANCES X AND X e
In Eqs. 8 and 9, both and a (I max) are maximized
when X0. That is, the combined equivalent impedance of
the mechanical and acoustical parts of the device should be
purely real. One way to satisfy this condition is to operate at
a frequency of resonance or antiresonance of the acoustical
resonator, where X a 0, and to adjust the compliance of the
driver so that the mechanical reactance X m is also zero at this
frequency. However, the X0 condition can also be satisfied
for any other frequency by adjusting the stiffness of the
driver suspension including the gas spring of the enclosure
so that2 X m X a .
Both and a (I max) are independent of the electrical
reactance X e . If performance of the system is optimized by
setting X0, then the imaginary part of the total equivalent
electrical input impedance of the system is simply the reac-
tance of the electrical components, X e . If the driver is induc-
tive, as is likely for an electrodynamic device, then the total
electrical impedance can be made real by the addition of a
829 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 107, No. 2, February 2000
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series capacitor, thereby eliminating the reactive component
of the load seen by the driving amplifier without otherwise
affecting the performance of the device.
In subsequent sections it is assumed that the stiffness of
the driver suspension has been adjusted to make X0.
III. OPTIMIZATION OF R a AND PISTON AREA
In driving the acoustical resonator with X0, the driver
sees an equivalent mechanical resistance R a S 2 Rea. By
adjusting the piston area S, the value of R a can be selected to
optimize or a (I max). In this section, the derivatives with
respect to R a of Eqs. 8 and 9 have been set to zero to find
the best values of R a , and thus for S.
A. Adjusting R a for maximum efficiency
The electroacoustic efficiency is maximized when R a
is set to the value R such that
R a maxR R m 1R m 1 R m ,
10
where (Bl) 2 /(R e R m ) and 1. For this value of
acoustic load, the efficiency takes on its maximum value of5
max , 11
2 12
or, in terms of ,
1
max . 12
1
The number is a figure of merit for the driver, determining
9
the maximum efficiency of the driver. For large , max
12/ .
From the point of view of efficiency, all drivers can be
ranked in quality simply by calculating max . The maximum
efficiency depends only on the parameters Bl, R e , and R m .
For this reason, it is useful to conceptually separate the pis-
ton and the suspension stiffness from the motive parts of the
driver. The magnet and voice coil together form a linear
electrical motor that is functionally separate from the piston.
Although it is possible to connect any particular motor to
any area of piston or suspension spring, it is actually only the
motor that has a potential efficiency max , independent of the
rest of the device. To attain this maximum efficiency, the
motor must work into the particular mechanical load R ,
which also depends only on the motor parameters Bl, R e ,
and R m .
Any acoustic load can be converted into the optimally
efficient mechanical load for a particular driver motor by
using the optimum piston area S given by
S R
Re a
Rm
Re a
. 13
While the driver may be said to be a high-impedance or
low-impedance device depending on the acoustic load, it
is important to remember that the thing which is high or
low is the acoustic impedance at the piston face, which
Ray S. Wakeland: Electrodynamic drivers in thermoacoustics 829
 TABLE I. Motor parameters for various drivers that have been used by thermoacoustics researchers. The first
three are off-the-shelf loudspeakers. The STAR and SETAC drivers are custom designed and built moving-
coil devices. The last three drivers are moving-magnet devices designed for single-frequency transduction at
high efficiency and power.

Bl Re Rm n max electric
Driver N/A kg/s % W

MW-142a 7.5 5.1 1.9 2.6 44 150

JBL 2206Hb 18.1 5.3 9.5 2.7 47 300
Altec 290-16 Kc 21.5 10.6 2.8 4.1 61 10
STARd 15.3 8.2 1.8 4.1 61 20
SETACe 18 1.7 2.2 9.4 81 200
B-300f 8.0 0.05 15 9.3 81 300
C-2f 41 0.24 48 12 85 2000
C-10f 85 0.52 80 13 86 10 000
a
Morel Acoustics USA, Inc., 414 Harvard St, Brookline, MA 02446-2902. The numbers listed in the table are
the measured values of a particular driver used at this lab.
b
See Ref. 1.
c
See Ref. 10.
d
See Ref. 11.
e
See Ref. 12.
f
See Ref. 13.

depends on the piston area. The motor, by contrast, works
most efficiently only at a single mechanical impedance,
namely R , which is independent of S.
One of the most important consequences of this fact
concerns the required piston excursion. The power provided
to the acoustic load is a u a 2 R a /2, where u a is the peak
velocity of the piston. Since the value of R a is fixed at R by
the requirements of motor efficiency, the power requirement
of the device dictates the piston velocity. Since a particular
thermoacoustic device will also have a set operating fre-
quency, the power of the device is directly linked to the
piston stroke d2u a / . For a given frequency and power,
an efficiently configured driver with a particular motor will
have to have a certain fixed stroke, regardless of piston area
and placement. If the driver is placed at a pressure node, the
piston area will be large and the volume velocity will be
large; the pistons linear velocity, however, is fixed by effi-
ciency considerations. Assuming that optimum efficiency is
a requirement, placing the same motor at the pressure antin-
ode will necessitate the use of a smaller piston, but cannot
reduce the required piston excursion. This contradicts the
idea that piston excursion can be controlled by placing the
driver at a pressure antinode, an idea that is found in some of
the classic papers that are the primary references for the
study of thermoacoustic engines. For example, Swifts article
in the Encyclopedia of Applied Physics6 states that ...the
loudspeaker-like driver was located at a pressure antinode of
the standing wave, so that the acoustic power was delivered
with high force and small displacement, easing engineering
difficulties associated with the flexing portion of the driver.
However, the electroacoustic efficiency was then maximized
by making the piston area small, thereby increasing the dis-
placement. The analysis presented here shows that the result-
ing displacement of maximum efficiency is the same regard-
less of the placement of the driver within the standing wave.
Table I lists motor parameters and maximum efficiencies
and powers for some drivers that have been used by thermoa-
coustic researchers.
B. Adjusting R a for maximum power
At maximum current, the acoustic power a (I max) is
maximized when (R a ) maxRRm . This corresponds to a
best piston area of S R m /Rea. Thus the best mechani-
cal load for maximum current limited acoustic power is
smaller than that for best efficiency by a factor of , and S
is smaller than S by a factor of . For such a small piston,
the driver may reach its stroke limit before it reaches its
current limit. The important point is that piston sizes smaller
than S can increase acoustic power output.
This provides another way to think about the earlier case
of maximum efficiency. There are two loss mechanisms in
the driver: electrical loss in the voice coil e I 2 R e /2, and
mechanical loss in the suspension m u a 2 R m /2. The pis-
ton area that minimizes the sum of these losses, m e ,
gives maximum efficiency. For a fixed acoustic power, the
mechanical loss can always be reduced by increasing piston
area and thereby decreasing the necessary velocity; however,
I is minimized for SS S , so any increase of the piston
area from S increases the electrical loss.
The main result for thermoacoustic applications is that
trade-offs can be made between stroke, power, and effi-
ciency. At fixed frequency and maximum current, reducing
piston area from the most efficient value of S in order to
increase acoustic power will not only degrade efficiencyit
will necessarily increase the piston stroke as well, placing
further demands on the suspension. On the other hand, using
SS will result in decreased stroke, but also decreased ef-
ficiency and decreased maximum power delivery. The ways
in which efficiency, acoustic power, and stroke depend on S
for fixed current and frequency are shown in Fig. 5. The
plot shows results of calculations for a particular high-
efficiency driver designed for a thermoacoustic application,
with 9.1 and max80% the SETAC diver from Table
I. The exact shapes of the curves depend on . The rapid
increase in stroke as S is decreased from S means that limits
on the stroke could make it impossible to reach S , even if

830 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 107, No. 2, February 2000 Ray S. Wakeland: Electrodynamic drivers in thermoacoustics 830

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 FIG. 5. Dependences of efficiency, acoustic power, and stroke as functions
of piston area at a single frequency and current for the SETAC diver see
Table I, a high-efficiency driver designed for thermoacoustic refrigeration.
that were desired. In this case, adding a stroke-limit line to a
plot such as Fig. 5 will give the absolute maximum power
for the driver and the load required to attain it, and will show
the penalty in efficiency from max .
IV. OPTIMIZING R a BY ADJUSTING OPERATING
FREQUENCY
The foregoing discussion assumes that one can select the
area of the piston. What if one wishes to use a driver off-
the-shelf, in which case the piston area is already deter-
mined? Is it still possible to achieve optimum efficiency?
Provided that the piston area is within a certain range, this
can be done by adjusting the operating frequency of the de-
vice.
A. Selection of operating frequency for fixed piston
area
In general, the piston area of optimum efficiency S
R /Rea is a function of frequency because the acous-
tic resistance Rea is a function of frequency. As an ex-
ample, consider a resonator consisting of a simple cylinder.
The real and imaginary parts of the acoustic impedance7 are
shown in Figs. 6a and b.
The dotted cursor lines show the lowest two frequencies
for which a is purely real, r resonance and a antireso-
nance. Near these frequencies the most efficient piston area
S , shown in Fig. 6c, takes on its smallest and largest
values. If the piston area S is between these two values, then
optimum efficiency can be achieved by operating at a fre-
quency where Rea()S2R . This design procedure as-
sumes knowledge of the shape of the resistance curve for the
resonator in question. This could be obtained with a mea-
surement, or by modeling using a computer program such as
DELTAE.8
831 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 107, No. 2, February 2000
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FIG. 6. The real. a and imaginary b parts of the acoustic impedance of a
resonator. These particular curves are for a cylinder. Part c shows the
optimum piston area S as a function of frequency.
B. Effect of operating frequency on required
suspension stiffness
For a particular S, the acoustic resistance takes on the
most efficient value at more than one frequency. Consider,
for example, a driver with a piston that is slightly larger than
S minS(r); the designer must decide on an operating fre-
quency either just above or just below r . The two options
have different consequences for the suspension.
Recall that efficient operation requires that XX m X a
0. The mechanical reactance is X m M m k m / , so the
required driver suspension stiffness is
k m 2 M m X a 2 M m S 2 Im a . 14
The M m term means that k m tends to increase with in-
2
creasing frequency. Just above r , however, Im a is nega-
tive, so in some circumstances the required suspension stiff-
ness may actually be less just above r than just below it.
Whether or not this occurs depends on the details of the
resonator impedance curves. Maximum efficiency requires
both X0, as expressed in Eq. 14, and S 2 R /Rea.
Combining these expressions gives
Im a
k m 2M m R n . 15
Re a
Two example curves are plotted in Fig. 7. The lighter curves
are for a very heavily damped resonator (Q5), for which
Ray S. Wakeland: Electrodynamic drivers in thermoacoustics 831

FIG. 7. Curves of optimum piston area a and the total spring constant
needed to make the total impedance purely real b. The lighter curves are
for a highly damped resonator (Q5), the heavier curves for a resonator
with less damping (Q15). The dashed curve in part b is the limiting
value k m M m 2 .
higher frequency always results in a need for higher k m . The
heavy curves are for a resonator typical of thermoacoustic
refrigeration applications (Q15). In this case, moving
above r results in enough resonator stiffness to decrease the
demands on the mechanical spring k m .
V. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
This paper has examined only a few of the issues in-
volved in using electrodynamic drivers in thermoacousitc re-
frigerators. There are others. For example, Ward has devel-
oped a method to minimize the pressure difference across the
piston.1 In a highly pressurized device with large pressure
amplitudes, this pressure difference becomes a serious con-
cern. Preliminary measurements made at this lab9 provide
some experimental support for the conclusions of this paper
concerning attainability of maximum electroacoustic effi-
ciency.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my advisor during this work, Steve Garrett.
Thanks to George Mozurkewich for helpful conversations
832 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 107, No. 2, February 2000
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about efficiency, and Robert Keolian for many important
corrections and improvements. Thanks to Matt Poese for
measurements of the Morel Driver. This work was supported
by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval
Research.
1
W. C. Ward, Cost-effective electrodynamic drivers with improved effi-
ciency for thermoacoustic refrigerators, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100,
2847A 1996.
2
F. V. Hunt, Electroacoustics: The Analysis of Transduction, and its His-
torical Background Acoustical Society of America, New York, 1982.
Original work published by Wiley, New York, 1954. This is Case I
on p. 140.
3
L. L. Beranek, Acoustics Acoustical Society of America, New York,
1986. Original work published by McGraw-Hill, New York, 1954. See,
for example, Fig. 3.43.
4
This is equivalent to expressions in Ref. 2 such as Eqs. 4.15 and 4.20
for the case where the force factor is purely real.
5
Equivalent to Ref. 2, Eq. 4.30 for the case where the force factor is
purely real.
6
G. W. Swift, Thermoacoustic engines and refrigerators, in Encyclope-
dia of Applied Physics Wiley-VCH, New York, 1997, Vol. 21, Section
5.3, p. 256.
7
L. E. Kinsler, A. R. Frey, A. B. Coppens, and J. V. Sanders, Fundamen-
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8
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Bill Ward at ww@lanl.gov
9
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13
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Ray S. Wakeland: Electrodynamic drivers in thermoacoustics 832