The use of the van der Waals equation of state for numerical simulation of
the piston effect results in underpredicting the magnitude of the pressure
wave by 38 % while overpredicting the acoustic heating by 13 % compared to
using a real gas equation of state from the National Institute of Standards
and Technology. When evaluating the piston effect at conditions typical of
cryogenic storage systems, the pressure response of the fluid was observed
to be tens of kilopascals. This pressure response was six orders of magnit
ude larger than had been reported in previous research. The extent of the a
coustic heating resulted in temperature increases in the bulk fluid that wa
s measured in tens of milliKelvins. Previous researchers reported temperatu
re increases in microKelvins, four orders of magnitude smaller than observe
d in this research effort.