Blake Mason

Blake Mason

Blake Mason is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. Prior to coming to Rice, I was a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Thermoacoustic Transduction in Individual Suspended Carbon Nanotubes

Published in ACS Nano, 2015

Recommended citation: Mason, B. J., Chang, S. W., Chen, J., Cronin, S. B., & Bushmaker, A. W. (2015). Thermoacoustic transduction in individual suspended carbon nanotubes. ACS nano, 9(5), 5372-5376. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.5b01119

We report an experimental measurement of the acoustic signal emitted from an individual suspended carbon nanotube (CNT) approximate 2 μm in length, 1 nm in diameter, and 10^–21 kg in mass. This system represents the smallest thermoacoustic system studied to date. By applying an AC voltage of 1.4 V at 8 kHz to the suspended CNT, we are able to detect the acoustic signal using a commercial microphone. The acoustic power detected is found to span a range from 0.1 to 2.4 attoWatts or 0.2 to 1 μPa of sound pressure. This corresponds to thermoacoustic efficiencies ranging from 0.007 to 0.6 Pa/W for the seven devices that were measured in this study. Here, the small lateral dimensions of these devices cause large heat losses due to thermal conduction, which result in the relatively small observed thermoacoustic efficiencies.

Download paper here

Recommended citation: Mason, B. J., Chang, S. W., Chen, J., Cronin, S. B., & Bushmaker, A. W. (2015). Thermoacoustic transduction in individual suspended carbon nanotubes. ACS nano, 9(5), 5372-5376.