We will teach the use of DELTAE by increasingly complicated examples in Chapters II, III, and IV. Beginning users should read through Chapters II and III until they reach an example of complexity appropriate for their own case, and then systematically modify one of our examples to suit. Chapter II is just acoustics, without thermoacoustics. It serves to introduce DELTAE's input/output formats and editing and plotting features. Chapter III gives the most complete discussion of the overall principles behind the thermoacoustics computations, and the simplest thermoacoustic examples. The agreement of these examples with published experimental data serves as validation of the code. Chapter IV gives the most in-depth discussion of the advanced options of DELTAE. Chapter V is a segment-by-segment reference chapter for the experienced user, summarizing assumptions built into the computations for each segment, the data format for each segment, and thermophysical properties.
Some of these examples were run on an MS-DOS machine, others on a Mac. (While the menu interface differs, the file formats and displays for both platforms are the same. When there are differences, they will be obvious.) The code was still being debugged while these examples were being run, so there may be some minor errors in these examples.
We assume that the reader of this manual is very comfortable with linear acoustics and reasonably familiar with thermoacoustics. We will use variables as defined, for example, in the list of symbols in ``Thermoacoustic Engines," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 1178 (1988).