“…Regarding thin metal film heaters and underlying thermal insulators, many studies have been conducted by using varied combinations: suspended Al wires-air (Niskanen et al, 2009), Si nanowires-polymer or -glass (Tian et al, 2011a), indium-tin-oxide film-glass (Daschewski et al, 2015), Si nanoparticles-sapphire (Odagawa et al, 2010), conducting polymers-glass (Tian et al, 2011b), thin Au film-porous polymer (Chitnis et al, 2012), thin Ag–Pd film-glass-Al 2 O 3 (Nishioka et al, 2015), carbon nanotube (CNT)-air (Xiao et al, 2011), or -grooved Si (Wei et al, 2013), graphene-polymer (Suk et al, 2012; Tian et al, 2014; Kim et al, 2016; Tao et al, 2016; Sbrockey et al, 2018), -porous Al 2 O 3 (Tian et al, 2012), or -glass (Fei et al, 2015), CNT-laser-scribed graphene-polymer (Yeklangi et al, 2018), and W-Al 2 O 3 -polymer (Brown et al, 2016). The basic characteristics of these devices are consistent with the theoretical analyses of the thermo-acoustic effect and its key factors (Hu et al, 2010, 2012a,b, 2014; Vesterinen et al, 2010; Daschewski et al, 2013; Lim et al, 2013; Yang and Liu, 2013; Wang et al, 2015; Tong et al, 2017; Xing et al, 2017). Making use of the non-resonant and broad-band emissivity with no harmonic distortions, possible applications have been pursued to audible compact speaker under a full digital drive, probing source for 3-dimentional object sensing in air, acoustic pressure generator for noncontact actuation, directivity control under phased array configuration, loud speaker, noise cancellation, thermoacoustic tomography, and thermoacoustic sound projector (Koshida, 2017c; Aliev et al, 2018; Bobinger et al, 2018; Julius et al, 2018; Liu et al, 2018; Song et al, 2018).…”