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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Development Of The Carbon Nanotube Thermoacoustic Loudspeaker, Troy Bouman
Development Of The Carbon Nanotube Thermoacoustic Loudspeaker, Troy Bouman
Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports
Traditional speakers make sound by attaching a coil to a cone and moving that coil back and forth in a magnetic field (aka moving coil loudspeakers). The physics behind how to generate sound via this velocity boundary condition has largely been unchanged for over a hundred years. Interestingly, around the time moving coil loudspeakers were first investigated the idea of using heat to generate sound was also known. These thermoacoustic speakers heat and cool a thin material at acoustic frequencies to generate the pressure wave (i.e. they use a thermal boundary condition). Unfortunately, when the thermoacoustic principle was initially discovered …
Advanced Uses For Carbon Nanotubes: A Spherical Sound Source And Hot-Films As Microphones, Micaela M. Thiery
Advanced Uses For Carbon Nanotubes: A Spherical Sound Source And Hot-Films As Microphones, Micaela M. Thiery
Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports
Super-aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) thin-film is used to create thermophones. The thermal properties of CNT film allow it to rapidly heat and cool when supplied AC power producing temperature and pressure gradients and, therefore, audible sound. The advantages of CNT thermophones include eliminating all moving components of traditional speakers and reducing the weight of the speaker itself by using CNT film, which is nearly weightless. Additionally, the flexibility of CNT film provides the unique opportunity to construct loudspeakers of various sizes and geometries. In this work, a spherical CNT thermophone is designed, manufactured, and tested for directivity with the overall …