Exploring Fourier methods with beer bottles
As anyone who has blown across the mouth of a beer bottle knows, beer bottles have a well-defined fundamental frequency. This paper shows how a beer bottle's acoustical resonance can be modeled as a one-dimensional driven-damped oscillator and includes enough detail to be useful in undergraduate laboratory experiments. While the frequency-domain Green's function of the bottle can be extracted through sequential pure-tone measurements, sufficient data to fit the model's parameters can be collected in just a few seconds when Fourier methods are used.
Authors
- David Kordahl (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2547-861X)
- Emma Foster
Institutions
- Centenary College of Louisiana (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- American Journal of Physics
- Published
- 2026-02-19
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0245272
- Primary Topic
- Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00