Harry, I cut most of your posting out but left the meat. I am surprised it took so long for this to get to vortex and I was going to post out work but thought there may be no real interest.
This is a great device and easy to build (The Prime Mover) portion and either solar or resistance or whatever waste heat can be used to get it to work (albeit) not great efficiency without proper design. A some leaders in the field are G.W. Swift and P.S. Spoor, (Loa Alamos National Laboratory). In fact there is a design software package (free) called DeltaE by Bill Ward and Greg Swift that is a fine bit of work in doing the design of a prime mover and acoustic refrigerator. It runs in DOS under a Windows platform (they dropped the Unix version). Some additional info can be found on the net, but various searches are required as the info is not all keyed under Thermo acoustics. I will list some thing to look for if someone needs additional info. 'Experimental study of radial mode thermo acoustic prime mover' Jay A. Lightfoot, W. Patrick Arnott, Henry E. Bass and Richard Raspet 'Experimental and Theoretical Studies of nonlinear saturation processes in annular thermo acoustic prime movers' 'Systematic Derivation of Weekly non-linear theory of thermo acoustic devices' U.S. Patent# 5,456,082 (Keolian et al.) U.S. Patent# 6,804,967 B2 (Symko et al.) U.S. Patent# 7,017,351 B2 (Hao et al.) Thermal Engineering 'TED Newsletter on the Web' #41 November 2003 'Design and Construction of a solar powered thermo acoustic refrigerator' Jay A. Adeff and Thomas J. Hofler, Dept of Physics, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey CA. 'Self Tuning Mechanism in a looped tube thermo acoustic engine' Y. Ueda, T. Biwa..... 'Heat to electricity thermo acoustic magneto hydrodynamic conversion' A.A. Castrejon.... 'Investigation of Transient non-linear phenomena in annular thermo acoustic prime movers', Laboratoire d' Acoustique.... 'Thermo acoustic Research at WKU', Physica on the hill Vol.2 #1 Fall 2003 This will get someone that has interest a good start and supply many more places to read and obtain design and research info. I have built a 10cm and a 30cm prime mover that will operate at around 145'C, albeit poor eff% but it was simple to build with RVC as the stack. Enjoy if you are so inclined... -----Original Message----- From: Harry Veeder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 10:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Vo]:A sound way to turn heat into electricity A sound way to turn heat into electricity http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=15401 University of Utah physicist Orest Symko holds a match to a small heat engine that produces a high-pitched tone by converting heat into sound. Symko's research team is combining such heat engines with existing technology that turns sound into electricity, resulting in devices that can harness solar energy in a new way, cool computers and other electronics. Credit: University of Utah Source: University of Utah http://www.physorg.com/news100141616.html
