[Physics] Why does the speed of sound decrease with increase in density

acousticsdensityenergyspeedwaves

In my book it's written that speed of sound will in increase with increase in density of the medium as molecules with get closer to each other, but after some browsing on internet I found out about Laplace's formula which states that speed of sound in a medium is inversely proportional to density of the medium?Which of these is correct and why?

Best Answer

The speed of a sound wave (a longitudinal wave) in a gas can be shown, using Newton's second law, to be given by $$v=\sqrt{\frac{\gamma p}{\rho}}$$ in which $\gamma =\frac{\text {molar heat capacity at constant pressure}}{\text{molar heat capacity at constant volume}}$

$\gamma =1.4$ for diatomic molecules such as oxygen or nitrogen.

$p$ is the pressure and $\rho$ is the density.

At first sight you might say that the equation shows the speed of sound in (let's say) a diatomic gas to be inversely proportional to the square root of the density. This would be true if we had a cylinder full of nitrogen (relative molecular mass 28), and then replaced the nitrogen with oxygen (relative molecular mass 32) at the same pressure. The speed of sound in the cylinder would drop by a factor of $\sqrt \frac {28}{32}$.

But suppose that we didn't change the gas, but squashed it into a smaller volume by pushing in a piston very slowly so that the temperature change was negligible. It's easy to see that $$\frac{\text{new density}}{\text{old density}} =\frac{\text{old volume}}{\text{new volume}}$$ and from Boyle's law, that $$\frac{\text{new pressure}}{\text{old pressure}} =\frac{\text{old volume}}{\text{new volume}}$$ So the speed of sound would be unaffected by such a compression!

But we could increase the pressure without changing the density by increasing the temperature of the gas in the cylinder without changing its volume. We can then see from our equation that the speed of sound in the gas will increase. [This makes sense because molecules at a higher temperature have a greater random speed and will on average move faster between collisions, so passing on faster the superimposed velocities that represent the sound.]