Heat transport by acoustic streaming in a resonance tube

The steady fluid flow known as acoustic streaming is capable of transporting heat advectively. This heat‐transport mechanism has occasionally been applied for beneficially cooling a warm object, but in other contexts (such as thermoacoustic cooling) its effects can be detrimental. Gopinath and Mills have computed heat transport by streaming between two plane sections of a cylindrical resonator with insulating walls. In contrast, the experiments described here treat the interaction between streaming gas and thermally conductive cylinder walls. The walls of a horizontally oriented resonance tube were instrumented with a heater and more than 20 thermocouples to permit quantification of axial conduction through the solid walls and radially outward natural convection. By applying conservation of energy to the tube walls, the local, radially inward heat current, q(x), was deduced. The quantity q(x) is related to streaming transport within the tube. The measurements delineate regions where heat is added to and r...