Thermoacoustic relaxation in a pin-array stack

The pressure response p1 of a fixed quantity of 4He gas subjected to sinusoidal volume perturbations is studied experimentally. Thermal diffusion near solid boundaries causes the gas response to be neither adiabatic nor isothermal. The data are interpreted in terms of the thermal relaxation function fκ which relates p1 to the spatial average of the acoustic temperature profile. Comparison of a number of geometries allows us to accurately determine fκ for a thermoacoustic pin-array stack.