Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.
This paper studies the trend of near- wall acoustic wave
flow in a thermoacoustic resonator with noble gas mixtures.
Dimensionless 2D N-S equations were solved numerically for
acoustic waves in a rectangular chamber generated by a
membrane acoustic driver. The dynamic viscosity and thermal
thermal thermal conductivity for the fluid mixture were
calculated using the Wilke and Wassiljewa’s method while the
gas mixture density is calculated using the virial equation of
state. These parameters are incorporated into the Re and Pr
number of the Navier-Stokes equations. Unsteady flow within
the chamber is observed for different mixture combinations of
He-Ar and He-Xe. The best mixture found is He-Xe (6:4)
where thicker thermal boundary layer profile is observed near
the solid surface. As time increases, vortex formation is found
near the wavemaker, a similar phenomenon observed for pure
fluid. This result shows potential for numerically predicting
thermoacoustic behavior that involves mixtures.
