Thermoacoustic properties of fibrous materials

The thermoacoustic properties of fibrous materials are studied using a computational fluid simulation as a test of proposed analytical models for propagation in porous materials with an ambient temperature gradient. The acoustic properties of porous materials have been understood in terms of microstructural models that approximate the material as an array of pores with empirical shape factors used to fit the pore theory to the material. An extension of these theories of acoustics to the thermoacoustic case with an ambient temperature gradient has been proposed by Roh et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 1413-1422 (2007)] and a model based on Wilson's relaxation approximation for porous acoustics [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94, 1136-1145 (1993)] is proposed herein, but the predictions of these analytical models have not been tested successfully against measurements. Accurately characterizing the effects of the applied temperature gradient in a wide bandwidth laboratory setup have proven difficult; as a result, the authors conducted a numerical simulation of propagation within a fibrous geometry in order to test the predictions of the analytical models. The results for several fibrous samples show that the models yield a reliable prediction of thermoacoustic performance from the shape factors and relaxation times.