Inverse heat conduction method (IHCM) is one of the most effective approaches to obtaining the boiling heat transfer coefficient from measured results. This paper focuses on its application in cryogenic boiling heat transfer. Experiments were conducted on the heat transfer of a stainless steel block in a liquid nitrogen bath, with the assumption of a 1D conduction condition to realize fast acquisition of the temperature of the test points inside the block. With the inverse-heat conduction theory and the explicit finite difference model, a solving program was developed to calculate the heat flux and the boiling heat transfer coefficient of a stainless steel block in liquid nitrogen bath based on the temperature acquisition data. Considering the oscillating data and some unsmooth transition points in the inverse-heat-conduction calculation result of the heat-transfer coefficient, a two-step data-fitting procedure was proposed to obtain the expression for the boiling heat transfer coefficients. The coefficient was then verified for accuracy by a comparison between the simulation results using this expression and the verifying experimental results of a stainless steel block. The maximum error with a revised segment fitting is around 6%, which verifies the feasibility of using IHCM to measure the boiling heat transfer coefficient in liquid nitrogen bath.

Environmentally friendly and low-cost technologies to recover low-grade heat source into usable energy can contribute to ease the energy shortage. Thermoacoustic technology is expected as one promising approach in this ascendant field. In this work, the multi-stage looped thermoacoustic prime movers with asymmetric configuration, which can provide travelling-wave resonator and appropriate acoustic field for efficient regenerator, have been proposed and experimentally studied. The presented looped thermoacoustic prime movers can start to oscillate with quite low temperature difference along the regenerator. The lowest onset temperature difference obtained in the experiments is only 17 °C (the corresponding heating temperature is 29 °C), which can be achieved in both three-stage and four-stage looped thermoacoustic prime movers, with CO₂ of 1 MPa or 1.5 MPa as the working fluid. An electric generator driven by a three-stage looped thermoacoustic prime mover with low heating temperature was tested to achieve the acoustic to electric conversion.