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Thermoacoustic engine has been proven to be a promising technology for automotive exhaust waste heat recovery to save fossil fuel and reduce emission thanks to its ability to convert heat into acoustic energy which, hence, can be harvested in useful electrical energy. In this paper, based on the practical thermodynamic parameters of the automotive exhaust gas, including mass flow rate and temperature, two traveling-wave thermoacoustic engines are designed and optimized for the typical heavy-duty and light-duty vehicles, respectively, to extract and reutilize their exhaust waste heat. Firstly, nonlinear thermoacoustic models for each component of a thermoacoustic engine are established in the frequency domain, by which any potential steady operating point of the engine is available.

Vehicle electrification is one of the biggest trends in the automotive industry. Without the presence of combustion engine, which is the main noise source on conventional vehicles, noise from other components becomes more perceivable; among these components, the cooling fan is one of the major noise sources, especially during battery charging. The design of cooling fan modules is usually carried out in the early stage before building prototype vehicles. Therefore, understanding the installation effects of the cooling fan on the radiated sound is essential to secure good customer satisfaction. In this study, three different measurement setups of cooling fans are carried out: free field, wall mounted, and in-vehicle measurement. Four cooling fan prototypes with different fan blade designs are used in each measurement. Correlations of these measurements are investigated through comparisons of the measurement results.