Assembly of an acoustic laser

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Uploaded by on Aug 8, 2007

Using a cigar tube, PC power supply,
piece of nichrome from a blow drier,
and a piece of the catalytic-coverter
"thermal stack" material from the
Physical Acoustics Group
Penn State Applied Research Laboratory,
we construct an acoustic laser and
get it to self-oscillate.

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  • I'm not trying to denigrate your work. This is clearly a wonderful experiment. However, what makes you call it a laser? If it were the acoustic equivalent of a laser wouldn't most of the sound be traveling in one direction. I would expect to hear only a hint of sound if this were a saser(?) .

  • The tube can also be heated externally (by an alcohol lamp or a blow torch) and a piece of steel wool can replace the porous plug.

  • The device is a thermoacoustic "engine". Specifically, it's a Sondhauss tube -- a quarter-wavelength acoustic resonator. The closed end of the tube is heated by a filament. Hot air then oscillates through the porous plug (the white object inserted into the tube), transferring heat from the hot, closed end towards the cool, open end of the tube. The air's motion reinforces sound waves in the tube, generating the sound heard.

  • so what's happening?

  • tis sound is so crazy

  • Nah, just a Rijke tube. But... isn't the asymmetrical hot section behaving as a sound amplifier? If you piped some noise through the tube, then turned the heater on and off, would the sound intensity get higher and lower? Could an audio amp be built from a large flat array of these devices? Just play a musical instrument on one side of the panel!

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