Thermoacoustic properties of fibrous materials

This work was done with Richard Raspet to confirm a parameterized model of the thermoacoustic properties of porous materials that he had proposed with Roh et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 1413–1422 (2007). Determining the thermoacoustic properties of these materials had proved difficult for previous students of Dr. Raspet’s so I proposed to build a three-dimensional thermo-hydrodynamic simulation to interrogate their properties directlyi—the sort of thing you’d only attempt as a graduate student. Neither Rich nor I had experience with high-performance computing or computational fluid dynamics, but we did our best to examine the available numerical methods that captured the appropriate physics, find example cases to test the model’s behavior, and, I think to Rich’s surprise, eventually delivered a full simulation that interrogated the complicated physics of random media. Rich was a good sounding board as I tried to test numerical issues I did not understand, always supportive of my effort and always ready to listen to me complain. This work, and my PhD, could not have happened without him.