Acoustics researcher Greg Swift of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, says MacroSonix has figured out a way around this natural barrier. This is a technical breakthrough because no one has achieved such high acoustic amplitudes before and the conventional wisdom has been that it would be impossible to reach such high acoustic amplitudes. Certainly in the field of acoustics, this is the most exciting thing that we have seen in a few years. But they kept their invention secret while they gained patents. The technology, which they call Resonant Macrosonic Synthesis, could have many commercial applications.
Sound waves are nothing more than waves of pressure, pushing in one direction and then the opposite.
Tim Lucas says he can make sound waves with pressures of 500 pounds per square inch. Compressors use moving pistons to pump in air at low pressure and pump it out at high pressure. Lucas says a home appliance manufacturer is already designing refrigerators and air conditioners that use his company's resonating cavity in place of a compressor. We're still looking at 2-3 years before those particular products hit the market. I mean, you're talking about putting a device into someone's kitchen that contains a sound hundreds of thousands of times louder than the space shuttle.