Piezoelectric loudspeakers have been used in thermoacoustic refrigerators for operating at the high frequency to miniaturize the system. Then the coupling between the piezoelectric loudspeaker and resonance pipe becomes an important factor for improving the performances of the system. By the equivalent circuit model, the expressions of the acoustic output power and electroacoustic transfer efficiency at a low operating frequency are obtained, and then the structures of the piezoelectric loudspeaker and resonance pipe, as well as the operating frequency, are optimized to achieve a high electroacoustic transfer efficiency and a large acoustic output power. It is also shown that when the total reactance of the system equals zero, the resonance frequency of the resonance pipe is the optimized operating frequency and a high acoustic output power can be achieved. However, the highest transfer efficiency and largest acoustic power cannot be obtained simultaneously, therefore a trade-off condition must be adopted.
Energy conservation is a critical problem in recently-emerging wireless sensor networks （WSNs）. Pulse position modulation （PPM）, as an exploring-worthy modulation format for energy efficiency, is tailored for WSNs into two schemes, mono-mode PPM and multi-mode PPM, in this paper. Resorting to an idealized system model and a practical system model, which combine the power consumptions in transmission and reception modules of nodes with the idealized and real- istic battery characteristics, the battery energy efficiencies of mono-mode PPM and multi-mode PPM are evaluated and compared. To minimize the battery energy consumption （BEC）, these schemes are further optimized in terms of constellation size M for a link in path-loss channels. Our analytical and numerical results show that considerable energy can be saved by multi-mode PPM; and the optimization performances of these schemes are noticeable at various communication distances though their optimization properties are different.
