Mode-locking of acoustic resonators and its application to vibration cancellation in acoustic heat engines

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volumn 106, Issue 3 I, 1999, Pages 1353-1362

  Spoor, P S ^a   Swift, G W ^a  

^a LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COOLING; FUELS; HEAT ENGINES; SENSORS; VIBRATION CONTROL;

ACOUSTIC HEAT ENGINES; COUPLED PASSIVE HALF-WAVE ACOUSTIC RESONATORS;

ACOUSTIC RESONATORS;

ACOUSTICS; AMPLITUDE MODULATION; ARTICLE; PRIORITY JOURNAL; SOUND TRANSMISSION; VIBRATION;

EID: 0032845399     PISSN: 00014966     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1121/1.427169     Document Type: Article

References (25)

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2. G. W. Swift, "Thermoacoustic engines and refrigerators," Phys. Today 48, 22-28 (July 1995); S. Backhaus and G. W. Swift, "A thermoacoustic Stirling heat engine," Nature 399, 335-338 (1999).
3. C. Sondhauss, "Ueber die Schallschwingungen der luft in erhitzten glasröhren und in gedeckten pfeifen von ungleicher weite," Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 79, 1 (1850).
4. "A simple theory of the Sondhauss tube," in Recent Advances in Aeroacoustics, edited by A. Krothapalli and C. A. Smith (Springer, New York, 1984), p. 327.
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6. G. W. Swift, "Thermoacoustic natural gas liquefier," 1997, in Proceedings of the DOE Natural Gas Conference, Houston TX, March 1997.
7. W. A. Marrison, U.S. Patent No. 2,836,033 (1958).
8. C. Huygens, in Ouevres Completes de Christian Huyghens, edited by M. Nijhoff, Vol. 5, p. 243 (Societe Hollandaise des Sciences, The Hague, The Netherlands, 1893) (A letter to his father, dated 26 Feb. 1665).
9. P. S. Spoor and G. W. Swift, "The Huygens phenomenon in thermoacoustics," in preparation for J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
10. case). For the realistic, large-diameter system (Ref. 5) discussed in Sec. IV in the text, comparing this result with Eq. (20) shows that the acoustic coupling is of order 10 000 times stronger than the mass coupling.
11. A. B. Pippard, The Physics of Vibration (Omnibus Edition) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), Chap. 12.
12. Reference 10, p. 403.
13. Reference 10, p. 323.
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15. The value of n can be determined either from the relaxation time of the oscillator from one amplitude to another, or from changes in steady-state amplitude in response to changes in load. For our thermoacoustic engines, only the steady state is well characterized, for when the engine is relaxing from one state to another, the power input is ambiguous, the thermal mass of the engine absorbing or supplying heat at a variable rate. Changes in steady state amplitude only determine the quantity n/Q, and cannot obtain n or Q independently. Fortunately, for the purposes of this work and that in Ref. 8, this is sufficient.
16. P. M. Morse, Vibration and Sound (American Institute of Physics, Woodbury, NY, 1986), p. 313.
17. 4He," Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1997.
18. N. H. Fletcher, "Mode-locking in nonlinearly excited inharmonic musical oscillators," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 1566 (1978). See also the URL www.csu.edu.au/ci/vol1/Neville.Fletcher/.
19. A. M. Fusco, W. C. Ward, and G. W. Swift, "Two-sensor power measurements in lossy ducts," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 91, 2229-2235 (1992).
20. W. C. Ward and G. W. Swift, "Design environment for low amplitude thermoacoustic engines (DELTAE)," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 3671-3672 (1994). Fully tested software and user's guide available from Energy Science and Technology Software Center, US Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. To review DeltaE's capabilities, visit the Los Alamos thermoacoustics web site at www.lanl.gov/thermoacoustics/. For a beta-test version, contact ww@lanl.gov (Bill Ward) via Internet.
21. N. Rott, "Thermoacoustics," Adv. Appl. Mech. 20, 135-175 (1980).
22. J. R. Olson and G. W. Swift, "A loaded thermoacoustic engine," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 98, 2690-2693 (1995).
23. 0, because the engines never have a completely uniform cross-section, which makes them shorter for a given frequency, thus lessening their surface areas. In Fig. 4, the hot ends of the engines are wider than the resonators, to provide more power, and the length of the engines is hence shortened to 0.44λ.
24. L. F. Moody, "Friction factors for pipe flow," Trans. ASME 66, 671-684 (1944).
25. T. J. Hofler, "Thermoacoustic refrigerator design and performance," Ph.D. thesis, Physics department, University of California, San Diego, 1986.