Abstract

We demonstrate that a simple Kundt's tube can be in practice used to measure the variation of concentration of a component in a mixture of binary gases with sensitivities proportional to the overtones of acoustical resonances in the tube. We investigate the technique by measuring the concentrations of the mixtures of monatomic and diatomic gases-argon, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. The results show that the higher the overtone the better the sensitivity as expected. We then apply this technique to measure the relative change of ozone concentration that is generated from the plasma discharging of neat oxygen. Our result shows that we can readily observe a shift of the resonant peak of ~5.6 Hz (from that of neat oxygen) for a 1-percent change in ozone concentration at the 6th mode of the resonance. This study shows that a simple Kundt's tube can be employed to quantitatively determine a composition of binary gas mixtures or to quantify the relative change of concentration of gas mixtures.