The Graduate Program in Acoustics and the Applied Research Laboratory have provided the home to a comprehensive research and development program in several areas of thermoacoustics since 1995 that has included collaborations with students and faculty in the Physics and Aeronautical Engineering departments.

Projects have spanned a range of topics from development of complete prototype devices like the Ben & Jerry's ice cream freezer to basic research efforts that include experimental investigations of high-amplitude oscillatory hydrodynamics and oscillatory heat exchange as well as numerical simulations of those same processes. This cross-fertilization of device development, meticulous laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations using parallel processing has fostered a deeper understanding than could have been achieved if these approaches had been explored in isolation.

We hope that this web site, along with the links it provides to other sites, will give both students and researchers a portal that can provide a picture of the progress and opportunities that this emerging area of multidisciplinary research and development.

The bellows bounce thermoacoustic refrigerator is shown without its surrounding pressure vessel. The upper end of the metal bellows is fixed and the lower end (piston) is driven by a moving-magnet electrodynamic motor. This unit has produced 119 W of useful cooling power at a temperature of -24 °C while consuming only 147 W of electrical power making it as efficient as the conventional vapor-compression refrigeration systems it was intended to replace.