Waste or combustion heat driven gas liquefaction
The concept of thermoacoustic heat driven gas liquefaction has been brought back on stage by a joint experiment of Qdrive and Aster-Thermoacoustics, combining a high performance pulse tube and a multi-stage traveling wave feedback thermoacoustic engine.
At a cold head temperature of -160°C the engine input temperature was reduced from 900°C down to less than 300°C which allows for extracting more heat from the combustion, prior to exhausting, and for the use of ordinary construction materials.
While initially the concept was intended for liquefaction of natural gas from oil wells, nowadays small and medium scale liquefaction of locally produced biogas for storage and transportation could be the main application.
The results of the experiments were presented on the “Second Workshop on Thermoacoustics” held on May 23 -25, 2014, at the Sendai Tohoku university in Japan.
The abstract and presentation may be found by the links below
