Thermoacoustic systems for electrical power generation: Review of conversion technologies, performance characteristics, and practical applications

Despite their potential to convert waste heat into electricity with no moving parts in the thermoacoustic core, thermoacoustic electricity generators (TAEGs) remain underutilized in industrial energy-recovery applications. Industrial processes collectively reject 20-50% of the input energy as waste heat, representing an electricity-generation potential equivalent to 15-20% of current global electricity consumption, yet commercial TAEG deployment remains constrained by manufacturing barriers, reliability validation gaps, and insufficient cross-laboratory reproducibility. TAEGs offer a versatile conversion approach compatible with industrial, solar, and biomass heat sources, with an inherent combined cooling-and-power (CCP) capability that organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and thermoelectric generator (TEG) systems cannot architecturally provide. This review examines TAEG research from its fundamental thermodynamic principles to commercial deployment, categorizing systems into standing-wave and traveling-wave configurations and evaluating four acoustic-to-electric conversion technologies: electromagnetic linear alternators, piezoelectric transducers, magnetohydrodynamic generators, and bidirectional turbines. Each technology is assessed in terms of its operating principles, performance, and application suitability, with findings synthesized into a comparative framework benchmarked against ORC and TEG systems, including explicit treatment of cross-study comparison limitations and uncertainty in synthesized metrics. TAEGs demonstrate competitive advantages in three niches: sub-150°C low-grade heat sources, distributed scales below 20 kW, and combined cooling-and-power applications. To improve cross-laboratory reproducibility further, we propose the Minimum Thermoacoustic Experimental Reporting Framework (MTERF), a voluntary 11-parameter reporting checklist. Near-term deployment is conditionally achievable for rural biomass electrification and small-scale marine waste-heat recovery, pending field validation of reliability beyond 20,000 operating hours; multi-kilowatt industrial-scale systems require a 5–10-year deployment horizon contingent on reliability validation, manufacturing scale-up at competitive cost, and resolution of bidirectional-turbine blade fatigue limitations.