Natural Engines
- 1 August 1985
- journal article
- Published by AIP Publishing in Physics Today
- Vol. 38 (8) , 50-58
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.880985
Abstract
Under certain circumstances, a flow of heat through a system can give rise to acoustic oscillations, converting some of the heat to work. Natural vibrators maintained by heat flows have been studied since the 1770s. Some of the best‐known examples come from acoustics: the “singing flames” first investigated by Byron Higgins in 1777, the Sondhauss tube and the Rijke tube. Most experimenters in cryogenics have observed the “Taconis oscillations” that occur when a tube, closed at the top, is inserted into a liquid‐helium dewar. A group at Tsukuba has studied such oscillations quantitatively. Oscillations driven by heat also occur on a very large scale, in certain classes of variable stars. ‘Taconis oscillations,’ the oscillations of some variable stars, and a novel form of engine are all based on cycles that involve an intrinsically irreversible process and a broken thermodynamic symmetry.Keywords
This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- Thermoacoustic heating at the closed end of an oscillating gas columnJournal of Fluid Mechanics, 1984
- An intrinsically irreversible thermoacoustic heat engineThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1983
- Experiments on thermally driven acoustic oscillations of gaseous heliumJournal of Low Temperature Physics, 1980
- ThermoacousticsPublished by Elsevier ,1980
- Convective instability: A physicist's approachReviews of Modern Physics, 1977
- Thermoacoustic effects in a resonance tubeJournal of Fluid Mechanics, 1975
- Review of the literature on Rijke thermoacoustic phenomenaJournal of Sound and Vibration, 1968
- Review of the literature on Sondhauss thermoacoustic phenomenaJournal of Sound and Vibration, 1968
- Surface Heat PumpingPublished by Springer Nature ,1966