Experimental study of thermoacoustic effects on a single plate Part I: Temperature fields

 The thermal interaction between a heated solid plate and the acoustically driven working fluid was investigated by visualizing and quantifying the temperature fields in the neighbourhood of the solid plate. A combination of holographic interferometry and high-speed cinematography was applied in the measurements. A better knowledge of these temperature fields is essential to develop systematic design methodologies for heat exchangers in oscillatory flows. The difference between heat transfer in oscillatory flows with zero mean velocity and steady-state flows is demonstrated in the paper. Instead of heat transfer from a heated solid surface to the colder bulk fluid, the visualized temperature fields indicated that heat was transferred from the working fluid into the stack plate at the edge of the plate. In the experiments, the thermoacoustic effect was visualized through the temperature measurements. A novel evaluation procedure that accounts for the influence of the acoustic pressure variations on the refractive index was applied to accurately reconstruct the high-speed, two-dimensional oscillating temperature distributions. Received on 22 March 1999