Man, incredible work. You saved me a massive headache in trying to explain this for my James Webb telescope video. Going to reference you in my video as thanks
I found this video because the Real Engineering JWST video got me curious about acoustic cooling. Even after seeing how it works, it's mind-blowing that this technology can keep the IR sensors on Webb running just a few degrees above absolute zero.
You are very good at relaying info. You simply say what is true. And you disambiguate phrases/words/concepts that people easily confuse. I would definitely love to see more acoustics stuff!
This video is 2 years old and one of the best educational videos of thermoacoustics. Please keep going and create a traveling sound wave demonstration as well, I still do not fully understand how they work.
Dear Ben, I'm glad to see the Part 2 of your thermoacoustic video series! You have done a very good job and you are presenting the experiments nicely and clearly. I hope lot of people will start to interest about thermoacoustics because it is a really interesting topic of the heat-engines. It was a good collaboration I'm waiting for your next video! BLADE
do u realize that writing from the wrong account gives Christina Khalil way much more subs than to you? lol I was filial to thermoacoustic so I dropped that women and subscribed to the right channel, but many with a weaker will may not be able to so yeah... will charge dangerously low ... resistance is futile ....
Other science channels cover a lot of interesting stuff too but this channel's the one and only channel that I can rely on to find out something new every once in a while, then the other channels start covering the same stuff because of it.
@@lstein8670 Oh yeah I watch him too, he just doesn't post as often as I'd like lol, it's gotten better this year but a year ago he only had one video every few months
@@lstein8670 Applied science is great but often the science is beyond the capabilities/resources of most people. Also can be mentally challenging at times too.
Besides this channel, I also like Robert Murray Smith, Tech Ingredients, Cody's Lab, and as mentioned Applied Science. But with A.S., I feel much of what he does is out of the purview of the average tinkerer. Sometimes also true for Tech Ingredients and Cody's Lab. I do like how NHIL and RMS do a lot of stuff that most of us can try or replicate at home as well (not always, but a good portion).
I hope you read new comments on older videos still: If you combine this video with your more recent video about self-cooling paint, and then build a system made with wind pipes, you could make a fully passive air-conditioner. The wind pipes generate the standing wave, the heat dissipating paint will radiate the heat away (either by feeding heatpipes to a cooling panel, or by painting directly onto the tube in the hot areas. The heat should radiate outward because of how your paint is made (the painted surface sticks to the paint layer slickly, allowing conductive transfer into the paint, while it also prevents the paint from radiating it back into the tube, while the outside will have a greater contact surface with air, allowing for convective cooling on top of radiation as soon as the temperature goes above ambient. Now if the wind is created by passive ventilation techniques, it would let the hot air create the resonance tone on the way out, while the cooled air pushes down and into the room, creating a fully passive clean cooled airflow even when there is no wind outside.
@@tarstarkusz I am sure the experiments that he shows us cost money, but either way, how come you don't just use an ad-blocker and call it a day? No more aggravation for you, and we all live in harmony!
These videos are absolutely excellent! The combination of high production quality and a clear build-up of information works so well. You manage to simultaneously be more informative than most other educational channels, without requiring excessive existing knowledge from the viewer. Bravo!
Very much hope there will be a part 3! Also acoustic heat pumps seem to be a very interesting technology, would love to see you discuss the basics of those as well!
I'd love to see this developed further, especially chaining the stacks together to get more extreme temperatures and building it into a device that can actually do something even if it might not be the most efficient thing.
You got a gift for teaching, one of the reasons I love your videos. Simple is better when learning foundational concepts. DIY is almost intuitively included with your demos. Thanks!
I'm a musician and I will gladly watch your videos on acoustics until the cows come home. You are the first person to ever introduce me to thermoacoustic engines & refrigeration. I wish this stuff was taught in physics class, but I REALLY wish it was taught in music class. Thank you!
I’m an engineer (would have been a research physicist if I’d had the coconut 🧠). But I also thought about a career in music. (Again, the 🥥.) Math is the link; the purist science of all! Good connection!
It's satisfying to read such a comment. I do teach physics and love to play guitar. Once I had a very talented (musician) student. He needed to pass some tests in order to go as a exchange student. I was supposed to guide him according to the stablish study guide. He was way behind on math & physics. So, change of plans, fuck the study guide. I ask him to calculate the note will be produced by a string of a material, x lenght, and stretched by and T force. Immediately his mind set changed for the best, and got interested into the math and physics required, which eventually helped him to take those tests like a piece of cake, and got the grades he needed without hating physics and math as often occurs.
I’d love to see more on thermo acoustics, it’s a really interesting subject I knew absolutely nothing about! I’d love to see the travelling wave designs too!
The way you've been able to break things down into a MUCH easier to comprehend way is honestly stunning. This is such a complicated topic with so much to try to grasp, yet you've managed to not only flawlessly explain it all, you manage to do it without ever sounding pompous. That said, HOLY HELL thermoacoustics is SO freaking cool! I never would have thought about using the flow of sound to generate/dissipate heat or even generate power. It would be incredibly interesting to see what the efficiency of such systems would be and explore whether or not they could be feasibly be used in lieu of more traditional methods. Like, is there a way that you could utilize the (natural or artificial) wind to generate a tone that could power one. What kind of energy could a thermoacoustic system provide under those conditions, and would it even be possible. It'd also be really interesting to see if different gas compositions (in a closed system) would produce results that are different than the natural atmosphere and what difference they would/could make. Higher/lower temps? Faster/slower diaphragm movement? Etc. There are a million questions that could be investigated; could it be possible to generate visible light using a certain gas mixture in a specific situation?
Dude, the amount of hours that I've enjoyed watching you is amazing, especially since i didn't really enjoy science class. if you were as science teacher, id come to your classes no matter how old i am.
I love you man. I really do. so much quality, entertainment, education. But most importantly, its how you seemingly never give up on projects. Lesser channels make a project but with little to zero follow up after the fact. And I love how genuinely interested you are. It feels as if you're taking us with a journey of your own discovery instead of just being a show host.
Use a thermoacoustic material to drive a stirling cycle and your can reach milikelvin temperatures. Use the fundamental as the primary mover and the 1st harmonic to drive the secondary stage. Gas medium will be 3He plus 4He for the coldest working medium. ❤
His models are so clean and more/less ready for a science museum. I hope you get funding from education, sir! Your contribution is massive and very interesting. I hope you’re getting adequate support!
Reminds me a an experiment done around 1967 with microwaves. A standing wave was set up with about 5 nodes and a row of plants along the standing waves. The height of the plants depended on their position along the standing wave. The height was attributed to temperature: where the waves superimposed, the temperature was higher and the warmer temp made the plants grow better. Where the waves interfered with each other, there was no temp increase.
Hey there Ben, Ive been a subscriber for awhile and I have no idea if you are going to read this but I just want to let you know that it’s ok to take a break from time to time. I know how stressful it is having people push you to make a new video and having to keep your private life out from work life. If you EVER need to take a week long or even month long hiatus, it is OK and I promise you that we will (almost) all support you in your decision. Your eye opening content has been played in many many many science classrooms all over the world and you are inspiration to millions. Again, if you EVER feel stressed or depressed don’t hesitate to take a little while off. I hope your doing alright and no matter what we’ve got your back 💙
good point! lots of the best youtubers dont pace out of the rush from the audience and burn themselves out. please take your time Ben, we can wait for this type of quality vs quantity.
Acoustic ring resonant concept is intriguing and has other amplification applications I find absolutely essential to design, more work with this would be very useful and immensely appreciated.
Using a cluster of smaller tubes arranged like in a conventional liquid/air cooler at a higher frequency might help solve the direct tube shell extraction method. Producing treble is more energy efficient than bass. It could scale into very high frequency coolers with relatively high energy efficiency.
Nicola tesla would be proud we are finally uncovering how the natural system work and how we can use them to our advantage, high frequency is the key… these systems have no moving parts, unlike a heat pump
These videos are great, not just in "content", but overall quality as well. As for recommendations or thoughts on other videos, I wouldn't mind seeing things like thermoacoustics. Just stuff you don't normally consider or pay attention to, yet is fascinating if you take a moment to learn about.
More of this please sir! Both absolutely fascinating and extremely informative. This is the type of stuff that could inspire aspirations for further exploration into the sciences amongst young minds both now and in the future.
I became fascinated by this subject when I read a report that staff at Los Alamos used a thermally excited acoustic heat engine to cool the tins of beer served at a staff outing, come barbecue. The solid state cooler worked by placing one end of the unit in barbecue fire, and the other in a water cooler bath for the cans of beer. The whole unit resonated at a very low frequency, emitting a low humming sound. From memory, the report showed a dumbbell shaped arrangement with an air gap between the hot and cold sides. A schematic drawing showed the arrangement of parallel metal plates, refering to the dumbbells as Holmholtz resonators. From memory, the report was in an issue of Scintific America or New Scientist. I have since learned that the technology has found an application in nuclear submarines, but I do not have the details of what is being cooled or heated, but I believe it is the submarines electronics.
I love how the foam balls distribute in discrete areas. Reminds me of quanta or something. Definitely a nice boltzman distribution. I think you are right about the beat phenomena being responsible and they distribute in those places because it minimizes horizontal motion in a standing wave. I bet you could take advantage of that to capture pressure differences for say an acoustic mass separator.
I feel like I say this almost every time, but the production quality and quality of content of this channel is nuts. I keep saying it because it impresses me every single time, so keep it up Ben! you are doing a fantastic job that always leaves me inspired!
Imagine an air conditioner that uses the heat from the sun to produce cool air without using a mechanical compressor! How cool would that be?! An even more energy-efficient and eco-friendly air-conditioner.
@@touyaakira4602 Nope, not really the same, close though. The unit I was thinking of would totally independent (utilized because of our 4th of July up and coming) of any external electrical implementation (utilized because of our 4th of July, up and coming). Oh B.T.W. ( Perrrrty Kitty icon) Thanks for the opportunity to Clearly indicate to true circumstance of the unit in question.
i do like it. for a moment, i'd thought of a traveling wave in a loop thinking i'd stumbled on to something original. was excited, and still am. it's thrown me into an imagined world using the concepts for metallurgy. developing new cheap metals is something we could all use. thanks, this has been thought provoking.
Cool! Sound is energy. I spent many years in the noise control business in the western USA so I am especially interested in using sound as an energy source to solve problems.
woah that thermochromic tape is super cool. i didnt know that existed! awesome series. please continue down this rabbit hole, its very interesting and im sure theres something to be learned from it.
Super impressive, I can tell the story was well planned by how well it flowed and how easy it was to understand. I might have to build one of those polystyrene ball sounds tubes for teaching undergrad physics.
As a professional brass musician and avid science enthusiast, this video makes me incredibly happy. Your explanation of fundamental resonance and the harmonic series is very well researched and explained.
Imagine a society without electricity being able to set up a refrigerator for their food that used no moving parts and only required they kept a fire lit in one specific spot.
We had great success during a senior capstone design project using a 3D printed stack using PLA. Have you had much opportunity to use DeltaEC to model your experiments? Would love to someday grab a beer with Greg Swift in NM. That dude is a genius.
I haven't taken the time to figure out deltaEC yet. It makes sense that a 3D printed stack would work nicely. I haven't thought much about 3d printing for that purpose. I should think more about it as you could easily work in space for heat exchangers to the outside of the tube.
The first harmonic is your original wave with 2 nodes and 1 antinode, the 3 node 2 antinode is the second harmonic. Also a very interesting video I can't wait for your next one!
Did/will you continue this series? The suggestions at the end sounded really cool but I'm having difficulty visualizing the usage of it. Thank you for your delightful and informative videos! I lost a lot of interest in studying physics after a horrible math course experience, but videos like this remind me of the beauty of the concepts.
I haven't forgotten about this but I haven't made much progress yet. It's a tough concept for me to learn myself so it takes a lot of time to figure out how I want to demonstrate.
@@Nighthawkinlight magnifying glasses and or laser, tuning forks, and stacked parabolic or conical diaphragms instead of the rolled plastic. Would like to hear more of your thoughts on the looped system.
I've been patiently awaiting part 2. I love the methods in which you explain things, I'd be interested in seeing a collaboration between you and Steve Mould.
very cool. There was something I saw using a bose style acoustic wave guide to amplify the sound-wave from a very small speaker on one end and transmit a much larger energy pulse to a diaphragm on the other end. The diaphragm was then coupled to a rod which powered a piston compressor for the refrigerator. The article stated that inside the wave-guide the sound level was amplified to an astounding 500 decibels! It also stated that if you were to open up the wave guide while it was in operation that it would disrupt the waveform and there would be almost no sound or energy inside the wave-guide enclosure. I thought this would be a revolution in the field of cooling and applicable to many other devices as well but I've not seen the device being implemented yet and it's been a few years now since I saw the concept explained from an M.I.T. paper.
Amazing work! Reminds me of various chapters of 'Sound', written by John Tyndall. I don't normally comment on videos, but i find this subject to be particularly fascinating and you are doing such an amazing job presenting these concepts, so please continue! 🙏🌌🎧
My hs science teacher: today in class we're gonna learn about sound waves. Me: why are we learning this? Like Is there a practical way we can use this? HS teacher: sit down and shut up. 25 years later Nighthawklight: Today were gonna learn about sound waves. And we're gonna make a fridge out of it. Me: Surprise Pikachu face. Listening intensifies.
@@SF-li9kh Thanks to standardized testing the teachers are incentivized to shift focus from "why" to "how". That way there is more time for repeating calculations (improving your standardized test results) and far less motivation/application (which would improve your understanding of a topic, your creativity and your problem solving skills).
Rediscovering you after realizing that YT isn't pushing your stuff to the front of my feed. Made sure to click the bell this time. You are a Gem of the Internet!
Definitely interested to see more! I work with sound as a composer and generally a noodler, and it's interesting how the properties of sound can be used for something mechanical like heat pumps. Very cool!
Fascinating! I was a mechanical engineer once upon a time, and despite having classes on vibration-system analysis and design, I never saw anything like this. Watching this video with the color thermometer strip gives me a much better understanding of your other video (where you use heat to produce acoustics). It's also helpful in my understanding to consider that molecules are already in motion, so the heat-to-acoustic generator isn't creating motion, merely adding more energy into motion that is already happening.
This guy has a wonderful way of explaining his self. It's easy to let the viewer get lost and just recite information to sound cool. I actually intook and consumed the information quite well and fully understood everything. A great teacher perhaps?
WOW, I'm totally impressed by your video. Perhaps if you had a fluid moving through the hollow copper pipes, to take the thermal energy differential thus generated, in or out of the system, it could possibly have unlimited potential uses. Imagine using the sun's heat to generate the necessary power so that you can use your thermoacoustic engine for internal cooling in buildings. Like I said, the potential of this kind of technology is practically limitless.
He used heat pipes, so there *is* a fluid inside! They use capillary action and a fluid in a closed loop system. Used a lot in computer cooling and whatnot since they're *very* good at moving heat.
I learn something everytime I come to this channel! Thank you for that my friend! I vote on MORE on this subject, not so much for it's current use, but what we haven't learned what it's capable of! Ya Rock Mate, thanks Fer sharin again!
This was an amazing demonstration of thermo acoustics. First video of yours I've seen, and I'm a big fan now. I appreciated the mystery of wave/particle theory you presented in the understanding of standing waves. Your demonstrations truly reflects the work and research of the famous inventor Nikola Tesla (whom I have researched for many years). I hope this series on acoustics continues, and I wish you luck on your journey.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant. My suggestion is the following. After explaining the concept with transparent glass tubes, you can collect heat or cold more efficiently with a copper cylinder around which you will tightly wrap a copper tube as a coil around the cylinder and solder it in place. Then, you can push some water (or a better fluid) through the copper coil to collect generated heat or cold.
I love this phenomenon. Resonating frequentsies are 1 of the few technologies that can produce over unity. Take a hard drive motor and put it on an old phonograph player. Install a large speaker at the face of the horn. Exite the motor with a hand crank radio. Find the right frequentsy and cut it on vinyl, in a repeating loop. Run the output of the speaker into a rectifier and capacitor. Control the motor with a potentiometer. The thing will run itself plus a light. The cone multiplies the sound from the needle to its largest point exponentially, for free!!! Just 1 way to go over unity.
The ideas and concepts this channel continues to produce never cease to amaze me, many of which I've never even heard of nor even dreamed possible. Keep up the fantastic work good sir, and I hope to see you include your bird in more videos :P S/He's just so darn adorable!
Could this be coupled with a peltier chip wrapped around or in contact with the hot side to produce electricity as well as cooling. The result, a refrigerator with a light that comes on when you open the door.
Exploring this technology in conjunction with a solar stirling engine and bamboo aeroponic towers to create all-weather outdoor aeroponic greenhouses that modulate root zone temp by using the towers themselves as resonant chambers and linked regenerators/heat pipes to exchange heat amongst auxiliary systems. Currently figuring out how to modularly heat/cool selective areas of the greenhouse depending on the species, climate, and season.
Those peaks you talk about remind me of something I noticed when prototyping an audio distortion circuit in ltspice. When a sine wave is distorted, it creates overtones, the volume of these overtones goes down slowly, until about 10 times the frequency. There are then these divots in the fft chart that creates a sort of bumpy look to the overtones. It appears as if the harmonic series modulates itself with each 10 times in frequency. Maybe this is a similar principle to your standing waves. My hypothesis is that the sharp increase in pressure around the fundamentals node actually distorts the waves inside the tube, creating harmonics that force the styrofoam pellets to rest in the nodes of said harmonics. The way you could prove this, is by measuring the pressure at multiple spots along the tube. I don't know the actual math behind sine and square/triangle waves, but if you plot out the pressure curves, they probably won't graph out a perfect sine wave. Hope that made sense.
But the distortion-peaks you mention are detectable on a SPECTROGRAM. One cant see them on the Waveform itselve. Oscilloscopes can show you the Waveform, whatever sound goes into it, shows often a wavy S-type form in a general, rarely you see an apperant secound wave . In order to show two waves among themselve, it would need to actually have one SINGLE Overtone from the distortion. And i know some Audio applications (accurate imitation of distortion) that actually produce those single-Overtone-distortions. So far it would actually be possible to see distortions like that, and actually if its just one spike it would NOT be the thenfold of Groundfrequency like here i think. But why would this be regarded as unexplainable by Scientists anyway, if its just Distortion? Distortion is wellknown..
@@erewrw1906 I was thinking it could possibly be a result of the pulse wave modulation (PWM) from his digital audio source? Would the same choppy pattern be seen with an analog source?
Maybe good idea to test the idea with a more advanced bead still light in weight yet has static dissipating properties, such as embedding hydrophilic material at the right depth and distribution.
The smaller peaks are your harmonic frequencies. The tube doesn't simply vibrate at it's resonate frequency, there are also a series of harmonics overlaid on top. They are forced to be a multiple of the resonate frequency. If you take a spectrogram of the sound, You should see a big spike at the resonate frequency, and then a series of smaller spikes at your harmonics.
almost correct, they're actually an interference pattern caused by the overlapping of overtones from the fundamental combining with the other modes of the tube
Thank you for making these videos! I've always wondered what sound waves are capable of since I first learned how the basic shapes of them can influence each other so much! Just watching these has given me a few ideas for some projects I'd like to try around the house! Please keep it up and thanks again for being an entertaining and informative youtuber!
Nicely done!! As Spock would say, "Fascinating!" I have always felt that the industry behind compressed coolant for refrigeration has worked hard to curtail scientific developments that would drastically improve the designs behind the need for cooling. Hopefully, us, meaning the human race, is smart enough to embrace these technologies to make our existence self-sustainable. I have learned so much from just a few of your videos today! Thank you for your invaluable contribution!
Well, not that people are never nefarious, but a lot of the 'locked in industry approach' issue you describe is simply down to a particular design being more efficient. At least at one point in time (with a given set of manufacturing techniques available, and resource availability). And then anyone who wants to be successful in that industry shifts to using that method, and then making tweaks and improvements to that method. Which ultimately kinda leaves competing approaches in the dust over time. And the further that goes, the harder it is to break the cycle, because businesses take significant financial risk to try something different.
Appreciate the demonstation of Thermoacoustic cooling. I landed on this video while looking for information on the James Webb Space Telescope and the Cryocooler that it employes to get the IR detectors to 7°K
You touch on using a stack of heat exchangers at each end of the tube, taking advantage of the second node; but what about increasing the stack size and using a higher resonant frequency to also increase the node count?
Nikola Tesla - 'If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.' I love that guy. Brilliant and looney, can't have one without the udder.
The reason why you see the different peaks is the same effect as waves in water think of it like throwing a rock in a pond, it creates a ripple that spreads outward if the pond is a small bucket, when the ripples hit the sides of the bucket they will bounce back, and when they hit other ripples they will bounce against each other, some of the force keeps going, with some of it bounces back. Will they continuous sound wave, you have many ripples bouncing off of each other as the primary force is traveling to the end of the tube and bouncing back to the speaker it's hitting itself losing some of its inertia and creating another ripple that bounces the opposite direction place the sound device you're using into water and you'll see the same exact effect.
@@JoinUsInVR But why does pasta gets indigistible, sort of, when reheated. Is it the same as when mashed patoes is made with a power tool aka magic wand. But instead of shearing forces the heat makes the starch lump together so the molecule can't be attacked by enzymes the human small intestines provides. So later only the big intestines with bacteria can do it but make you bloat up in the process and getting cramps or just too much pressure to be comfortable.
This is so cool! I wonder what would happen if it's done with say, a repeating explosion. Like a standing shockwave almost. Would it get super cold and super hot on the other end? or would it just overheat the entire thing and explode? Some fascinating ideas either way
I definitely think it follows that higher amplitude/decibel waves cause more compression and should therefore create higher temperature in the gases on the hot end, but where I think that does go wrong is that this all has to happen in a pretty sealed system, and I think we can all picture what happens when things blow up in a confined space. So, you may just make the world's most well-intentioned pipe bomb.
The node can't be exactly at the speaker though? The speaker diaphragm is moving, and a node requires no displacement. I'm guessing this has something to do with impedance matching, since at the speaker both pressure and displacement are fluctuating.
The speaker acts like a hand on the end of a jump rope. Yes, it's displacing slightly in order to feed more energy into the wave and so it's not a perfect node, but it's very close in practice. You can also make a speaker act as an antinode, all depending on the frequency in relation to the tube length.
@@Nighthawkinlight that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification. I was actually kind of forgetting the wavelength, which actually determines the the shape of the wave in the tube. The closed end really has to be a node, after all. The speaker probably works a lot better with high pressure amplitude and little displacement, too.
@@niklaskoskinen123 i place a skar audio driver@ about one third (0.217, 0.349, 0.424. 0.66. 0.714 and0.848 are odd harmonic node/anti for pressure/velocity) from the closed end of a pipe as seen as the heat source/wet towel location in the earlier video and the upper bandwidth opens up to the next null (5/4 harmonic instead of 3/4 in a quarter wave pipe subwoofer. also adding a pipe about the same (1/3 the original pipes)distance away at the other end will supercharge this affect and the resonance will go nuts at the 3/4 harmonic at the top of the bandwidth if the driver is left at the 1/3 location in the original(move it to end fired). I think theres an idea here for a bass boosted thermo acoustic engine, lol!
The moment I saw that tube I instantly thought of a loop but more even a tube spiral, glad you mentioned it in the end can't wait to see it. A lot of these principles you explore feels like the missing mechanist from inside a Pyramid. The tube seems to vibrate similar to a crystal fork.
@@Grunge_Cycling But with noise. Ok don't now how "loud" a "bladeless" fan is. But on a concert or cinema it get canceled out by the crowd or the intense munching of heat inflated cereal.
