Rijke Tube - Discovery

Discovery

P. L. Rijke was a professor of physics at the Leiden University in the Netherlands when, in 1859, he discovered a way of using heat to sustain a sound in a cylindrical tube open at both ends. He used a glass tube, about 0.8 m long and 3.5 cm in diameter. Inside it, about 20 cm from one end, he placed a disc of wire gauze as shown in the figure on right. Friction with the walls of the tube is sufficient to keep the gauze in position. With the tube vertical and the gauze in the lower half, he heated the gauze with a flame until it was glowing red hot. Upon removing the flame, he obtained a loud sound from the tube which lasted until the gauze cooled down (about 10s). It is safer in modern reproductions of this experiment to use a Pyrex tube or, better still, one made of metal.

Instead of heating the gauze with a flame, Rijke also tried electrical heating. Making the gauze with electrical resistance wire causes it to glow red when a sufficiently large current is passed. With the heat being continuously supplied, the sound is also continuous and rather loud. Rijke seems to have received complaints from his university colleagues because he reports that the sound could be easily heard three rooms away from his laboratory. The electrical power required to achieve this is about 1 kW.

Lord Rayleigh, who wrote the definitive textbook on sound in 1877, recommends this as a very effective lecture demonstration. He used a cast iron pipe 1.5 m long and 12 cm diameter with two layers of gauze made from iron wire inserted about quarter of the way up the tube. The extra gauze is to retain more heat, which makes the sound longer lasting. He reports in his book that the sound rises to such intensity as to shake the room!

A "reverse" Rijke effect — namely, that a Rijke tube will also produce audio oscillations if hot air flows through a cold screen — was first observed by Rijke's assistant Johannes Bosscha and subsequently investigated by German physicist Peter Theophil Rieß.