Thermoacoustics (PDF)

Greg Swift received his PhD in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1980, and has worked in the Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) ever since. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, of the American Physical Society, and of LANL. He received the Acoustical Society's Silver Medal in Physical Acoustics in 2000, an award that has been given, on average, only every three years. He received the US Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award in 2004, in the category of Environmental Science and Technology. The main focus of Greg's research has been the invention and development of novel energy-conversion technologies. He enjoys the thermodynamics of heat engines and refrigerators, the thermodynamics of non-ideal-gas fluids, physical acoustics, hydrodynamics, and low-temperature physics. He hopes that thermoacoustic engines and refrigerators will play a meaningful role in the energy economy of the 21st century.



At Los Alamos, Greg has mentored two Master's students, three Ph.D. students, and 13 postdocs, and enjoyed significant partnerships with ten corporate collaborators. He is co-author (or, occasionally, sole author) of about 100 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings. He is responsible for two dozen patents, and the thermoacoustics design and analysis software most commonly used worldwide-DeltaEC.

“This work approaches acoustics in general very differently than other texts. … We are big fans of this book. It is much more than a treatise on how to make acoustical refrigerators and heat engines. It presents another way to approach the fundamentals of acoustics.” (Robert M. Keolian, Steven L. Garrett, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol 143 (4), April, 2018)

(Quote for the First Edition)

“Swift begins a textbook that employs 21st century pedagogical tools to introduce students and researchers to a 21st century technology. … The complete and systematic exposition of thermoacoustic theory and experimental technique in this new textbook should make Swift’s understanding accessible to a far wider group of scientists and engineers who can go on to exploit that understanding and produce practical devices while contributing to the extension of that understanding by bringing their expertise from outside ‘acoustics’ into thermoacoustics.” (Steven L. Garrett, Journal of the Acoustical Society, Vol. 113, May, 2003)