Tetsuya Honda

Vuilleumier Cycle Heat Pump

ABSTRACT The Vuilleumier heat pump is the thermally activated heat pump, which has been studied mainly as the cryocooler in the past. However, when applied as the heat pump, it has been expected to have several attractive features such as non CFC heat pump, thermal activation, high theoretical COP, less dependence of heating capacity on outdoor temperature than vapour compression cycle, clean exhaust gas, etc. . The studies on its application to the air conditioning heat pump are quite a few which deal with the theoretical performance prediction. The paper describes the performance test results on the small scale machine for verifying the features and identifying the issues as the heat pump application.