Identifying molecular relaxation processes in excitable gases remains challenging. An algorithm that reconstructs the primary relaxation processes is presented. Based on measurements of acoustic attenuation and sound speed at two frequencies, it synthesizes the entire frequency dependence of the complex effective specific heat of the gas, which is the macroscopic "footprint" of relaxation effects. The algorithm is based on the fact that for a simple relaxation process, such as occurs in many polyatomic gases at temperatures around 300 K, the effective specific heat traces a semicircle in the complex plane as a function of frequency. Knowing the high-frequency or instantaneous value of the specific heat provides the capability to not only sense the presence, but also infer the nature and, for mixtures of unlike-symmetry molecules, the concentration of foreign molecules leaking in a host gas.
Acoustic attenuation provides the potential to identify and quantify gases in a mixture. We present results for a prototype attenuation gas sensor for binary gas mixtures. Tests are performed in a pressurized test cell between 0.2 and 32 atm to accommodate the main molecular relaxation processes. Attenuation measurements using the 215-kHz sensor and a multiseparation, multifrequency research system both generally match theoretical predictions for mixtures of CO 2 and CH 4 with 2% air. As the pressure in the test cell increases, the standard deviation of sensor measurements typically decreases as a result of the larger gas acoustic impedance.
In a previous paper [Y. Dain and R. M. Lueptow, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 109, 1955 (2001)], a model of acoustic attenuation due to vibration-translation and vibration-vibration relaxation in multiple polyatomic gas mixtures was developed. In this paper, the model is improved by treating binary molecular collisions via fully pairwise vibrational transition probabilities. The sensitivity of the model to small variations in the Lennard-Jones parameters--collision diameter (sigma) and potential depth (epsilon)--is investigated for nitrogen-water-methane mixtures. For a N2(98.97%)-H2O(338 ppm)-CH4(1%) test mixture, the transition probabilities and acoustic absorption curves are much more sensitive to sigma than they are to epsilon. Additionally, when the 1% methane is replaced by nitrogen, the resulting mixture [N2(99.97%)-H2O(338 ppm)] becomes considerably more sensitive to changes of sigma(water). The current model minimizes the underprediction of the acoustic absorption peak magnitudes reported by S. G. Ejakov et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113, 1871 (2003)].
A nonresonant, lumped-element technique is used to investigate the behavior of tapered cylindrical flow constrictions (jet pumps) in the nonlinear oscillatory flow regime. The array of samples studied spans a wide range of inlet curvature radii and taper angles. By measuring the rectified steady pressure component developed across a jet pump as well as the acoustic impedance, the minor loss coefficients for flow into and out of the narrow end of the jet pump are determined. These coefficients are found to be relatively insensitive to all but the smallest curvature radii (i.e., sharp edges). For fixed radius of curvature, the inflow minor loss coefficient increases with increasing taper angle while the outflow coefficient remains relatively constant. For all of the samples, the steady flow minor loss coefficients are also measured and compared to their oscillatory flow counterparts. The agreement is good, confirming the so-called Iguchi hypothesis.
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