Thermoacoustic engines history:
Narukama Shinto ritual:
"Kibitsunokama", which is first mentioned in 1568.
A long time ago, a rice steam thermoacoustic phenomenon was used in Japan during religious activities.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/azeT3ZXKt2w
http://www.stirling-tech.sakura.ne.jp/kob-sc/experiment/kama/cankama.html
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%B3%B4%E9%87%9C%E7%A5%9E%E4%BA%8B
Experiment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqa5t8nefo
I pushed together three (the six is better) cans of beer (you can make from tin cans also). It is important that the machine is not too short, it must be at least 30 cm long. I placed a metal sieve on top of the bottom box. Pour a maximum of 2 poons of water into the box, no more. Pour 1deci of rice on the net. The net should be at the top of the first box of the machine with three beer cans, ie at the bottom 1/3 of the machine. . When the water starts to boil and the part under the rice fills with steam, it will sound loud enough. The neighbor came out into the hallway, to see what this noise might be :-)!
Big steam thermoacoustic generator
Maybe something will come of it:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222015687
https://wetlab.net.technion.ac.il/files/2022/08/Yang-etal_Energy_2022.pdf
Higgins Singing Flame:
-Byron Higgins activity from the earliest from 1777,
Higgins placed a hydrogen flame in a vertical tube and thus obtained a significant, high-amplitude sound.
Higgins Singing Flame:
Rijke tube
Here you can see and hear the Rijke tube, its operation is also explained in the video:
The next step was PL Rijke, who was professor of physics at the Dutch University of Aleiden in 1859. He used a glass tube 0.8 m long and 3.5 cm in diameter. Inside, about 20 inches from the bottom end, he placed a wire mesh. He held the tube vertically and heated the wire mesh to a red glow. When you removed the flame from the tube, approx. For 10 seconds, until the net had cooled, a very loud sound was made.
Rijke's colleagues allegedly complained that the sound was disturbing even for three rooms from the laboratory. (This required about 1kW of electric current…)
The Rijke tube is safer than Higgins ’singing flame experiment because there is no need to use hydrogen. And nowadays, electric heating is often used for it, so it is more convenient.
Sondhauss tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anALGe4iBWY
It is a tube with one end closed.
This phenomenon was first brought to our attention in 1850 by glassblowers and was described by the German physicist Karl Friedrich Julius Sondhauss (1815-1886). And Lord Rayleigh wrote an explanation for this as well.
At that time, no stack (usually very loose metal wadding) had been placed in it, but a tube with a sphere at the end and heating at the base of the sphere was used.
Later, using the stack significantly increased its efficiency and power.
(Physics teachers would be much better off using this instead of a Rijke tube, Because it’s simpler, cheaper, and doesn’t need that much heat either, but they know less or don’t know that the stack needs to be loose enough, so they can’t the experiment ...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHKmMrlxo24
https://youtu.be/mKmdtja3fbA?si=EKJe4yUPNtq-8Uhd&t=293
Fluidyne engines:
These machines are on the one hand the frontiers of thermoacoustics and on the other hand their antecedents, so it is worth reviewing them.
There are several such machines.
The liquid swings in the loop and the this fluid pushing the gas through the regenerator, and the gas heats-cools and expands-contracts. On one side of the loop, there is a thinner tube on the water column, where the amount of water column in a given loop branch increases or decreases according to pressure fluctuations. The fluid also swing into the thiner loop, and with this momentum increases or decreases the height of the liquid column in the connection side of the thicker loop.
Pandey in 198l build a very large fluidyne machine. It could pump 15 m3 water per hour with an efficiency of 7%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidyne_engine
PDF:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gTwcCqW58Y3QkKr4NkgzC5Ds5qf09Kyg/view
History of the development of thermoacoustic generators:
In 1962, Carter experimented with various Sondhauss tubes to increase performance. Shortly afterwards, Feldman achieved 27W of acoustic power with 600W of heat input. Merkli Thomann realized in 1975 that acoustic waves could be used to operate a heat pump, meaning she invented the thermoacoustic refrigerator.
Devices operating on the thermoacoustic principle can be divided into two major groups: in one, standing waves are formed, in the other type they excite traveling waves. Ceperley (1979) invented a thermoacoustic device based on the Stirling motor, but remodeled the original Stirling motor by leaving moving parts. After the discovery of Ceperley, several researchers experimented with further development of the tool. In doing so, stacks and heat exchangers of different sizes and numbers of tubes were placed in the device, so they could also increase performance and efficiency.
Nikolaus Rott (ETH-Zürich) describes his theory, which to this day is the basis for thermoacoustic studies. It was motivated by an understanding of the so-called Taconis oscillation where one end of the tube is cooled and spontaneous oscillation occurs in it. Höfler (1986) based his work on the construction of a refrigerator that was touched by the first speaker. Its efficiency was 12%, it reached 200 K degrees, and its power was 3W!
Heat exchangers developed by Wheatley et al. (1985) were used. An important step was the development of a simulation software called DeltaEc in 1994. The first advanced wave machine was built in 1999 at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL)
Wollan et al. (2002); they built a thermoacoustic motor with standing waves with a power of 17 kW and an efficiency of 18%. Yazaki et al. (1998) and Kees de Blok (1998) designed traveling-wave thermoacoustic devices. These are special thermoacoustic Stirling motors with no moving parts, but they have further developed Ceperley’s (1979) basic design. The equipment includes a special heat exchanger, stack, heat recovery (regenerator), heat buffer (flow buffer), flow feedback pipe; their power is a few kW and their efficiency is around 30%. Backhaus and Swift (2000, 2001), Backhaus (2002), and Gardner and Swift (2003) designed a thermoacoustic motor in which one stationary-wave device and two travel-wave devices were connected in a cascade circuit. This device is reliable, its performance and efficiency may exceed the characteristics of previous thermoacoustic equipment. Developments in manufacturing costs will determine the extent to which these devices will become widespread in the near future (Beke, 2011b). The essence of thermoacoustic energy conversion is to use the properties of sound waves for direct heat-electricity conversion. In the future, it can replace condensing refrigerators and heat pumps, and it will be a solution and a competitor to photovoltaic systems (solar panels). Nowadays, intensive research is underway to create a better and better device.
The many source of this part is: (Tamás Beke, 2011b). and Nikolas Fidorra Braunschweig, had a thesis on 17.8.2012!
