Understanding rapid fluid flow from the passage of a sound wave

James Friend – jfriend@ucsd.edu

Medically Advanced Devices Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States

Popular version of 1pPA6 – Acoustic Streaming
Presented at the 187th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://eppro01.ativ.me//web/index.php?page=Session&project=ASAFALL24&id=3770639

–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–

Acoustic streaming is the flow of fluid driven by the interaction of sound waves with a fluid. Traditionally, this effect was viewed as slow and steady, but recent research shows it can cause fluids to flow rapidly and usefully. To understand how this mechanism works, the researchers devised an entirely new approach to the problem, spatiotemporally separating the acoustics from the fluid flow, providing a closed-form solution, a first. This phenomena has applications in areas like medical diagnostics, biosensing, and microfluidics where precise fluid manipulation is needed, and the analysis techniques may be useful from particle physics to geoengineering.