Ing. Krištof Pučejdl

Rijke tube is a popular physical experiment demonstrating a spontaneous generation of sound in an open vertical pipe with a heat source. This laboratory instance of thermoacoustic instability has been researched due to its significance in practical thermoacoustic systems. We revisit the experiment, focusing on the possible use of the Rijke tube as a musical instrument. The novelty presented in this paper consists in shifting the goal from sound suppression to active sound generation. This called for modifying the previously investigated methods for stabilization of thermoacoustic oscillations into their excitation and control of their amplitude. On our way towards this goal, we developed a time-domain mathematical model that considers the nonlinear and time-varying aspects of the Rijke tube. The model extends the existing modeling and analysis approaches, which are mainly based in frequency domain. We also present an extension of the basic laboratory setup in the form of an array of Rijke tubes equipped with a single speaker used to control multiple Rijke tubes with different natural frequencies simultaneously.