Design and fabrication of microchannel test rig for ultra-micro wave rotors

Wave rotor technology has shown a significant potential for performance improvement of thermodynamic cycles. The wave rotor is an unsteady flow machine that utilizes shock waves to transfer energy from a high energy fluid to a low energy fluid, increasing both the temperature and the pressure of the low energy fluid. At microscale, shock wave compression was shown analytically to have higher efficiency than compression by mechanical devices such as impellers or pistons. A second step in proving this superiority of shock wave compression is to design and test a microscale shock tube, which is a perfect model for one of the wave rotor channels. Last step is fabrication of a full wave rotor manufactured using traditional MEMS technology. The paper summarizes the conclusions of the analytical study, describes the details of fabrication of micro shock tube test rig and the design of the ultra-micro wave rotor (UμWR). Florin Iancu is currently employed by Johnson Controls Inc., in York, PA, USA. Research was conducted while he was a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University.