Measuring Shell Resonances of Spherical Acoustic Resonators

Coupling between the gas and shell is a concern in the experiment used at LNE-CNAM to determine the Boltzmann constant k B by an acoustic method. As the walls of real resonators are not perfectly rigid, some perturbations occur in the frequency range of the acoustic resonances measured within helium gas contained in the cavity. As a contribution for a better understanding of this phenomenon, an experiment to measure the shell modes of the spherical resonators is in use in this laboratory. A work in progress to assess these modes using a hammer blow method together with modal analysis is reported here. The study is carried out with an air-filled, copper-walled, half-liter quasi-spherical resonator in the frequency range from 1 Hz to 20 kHz. Results show that the shell modes expand into multiple resonances of similar modal shape, including the “breathing” mode. The observations reported in other studies of shell perturbations at other frequencies than the breathing frequency are confirmed.