A scroll expander was applied to the Micro-Compressed Air Energy Storage system, and its energy conversion efficiency was investigated. In order to study the variation mechanism of the volume, mass, pressure and temperature of the air in different chambers, the mathematical model of the expansion process was developed on the base of the geometric model, mass conservation equation, ideal gas equation and energy conservation equation. Then, the mathematical model was implemented in Matlab, and the simulated energy conversion efficiency defined as the ratio between the output shaft power of the scroll expander and the input compressed air power was obtained. Furthermore, a test system was built in order to validate the mathematical model and study the improvement of the energy conversion efficiency. The prototypes of the scroll expander with different cross-sectional areas of the intake port or the discharge port were fabricated and tested in the experiments. Results show that the simulated torque and energy conversion efficiency agree well with the experimental results. Also, there is a small deviation between the expansion process and the ideal isentropic process due to the gas leakage, intake and discharge loss. In addition, the air supply pressure and the cross-sectional area ratio of the discharge port to the intake port are two important parameters for the improvement of the energy conversion efficiency. The experiments show that the energy conversion efficiency varies from 23% to 36% at the air supply pressure of 0.35 to 0.65 MPa, indicating that it is proportional to the air supply pressure. It can also be concluded from the experiments that when the air pressure is higher than 0.45 MPa, the ideal ratio range can be determined as 0.6-0.8. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.