Effects of fluid medium flow and spatial temperature variation on acoustophoretic motion of microparticles in microfluidic channels.

A numerical modeling method for accurately predicting the acoustophoretic motion of compressible microparticles in microfluidic devices is presented to consider the effects of fluid medium flow and spatial temperature variation that can significantly influence the acoustophoretic motion. In the proposed method, zeroth-order fluid medium flow and temperature, and first- and second-order acoustic fields in the microfluidic devices are first calculated by applying quadratic mapping functions and a second-order finite difference method (FDM) to perturbed mass, momentum, and energy conservation equations and state equation. Then, the acoustic radiation force is obtained based on the Gorkov's acoustic radiation force equation and applied to the Newton's Equation of Motion to calculate the microparticle motion. The proposed method was validated by comparing its results to a commercial software package, COMSOL Multiphysics results, one-dimensional, analytical modeling results, and experimental results. It is shown that the fluid medium flow affects the acoustic radiation force and streaming significantly, resulting in the acoustic radiation force and streaming prediction errors of 10.9% and 67.4%, respectively, when the fluid medium flow speed is increased from 0 to 1 m/s. A local temperature elevation from 20 °C to 22 °C also results in the prediction errors of 88.4% and 73.4%.

Modeling of wave propagation in drill strings using vibration transfer matrix methods.

In order to understand critical vibration of a drill bit such as stick-slip and bit-bounce and their wave propagation characteristics through a drill string system, it is critical to model the torsional, longitudinal, and flexural waves generated by the drill bit vibration. Here, a modeling method based on a vibration transfer matrix between two sets of structural wave variables at the ends of a constant cross-sectional, hollow, circular pipe is proposed. For a drill string system with multiple pipe sections, the total vibration transfer matrix is calculated by multiplying all individual matrices, each is obtained for an individual pipe section. Since drill string systems are typically extremely long, conventional numerical analysis methods such as a finite element method (FEM) require a large number of meshes, which makes it computationally inefficient to analyze these drill string systems numerically. The proposed "analytical" vibration transfer matrix method requires significantly low computational resources. For the validation of the proposed method, experimental and numerical data are obtained from laboratory experiments and FEM analyses conducted by using a commercial FEM package, ANSYS. It is shown that the modeling results obtained by using the proposed method are well matched with the experimental and numerical results.

Planar nearfield acoustical holography in moving fluid medium at subsonic and uniform velocity.

Nearfield acoustical holography (NAH) data measured by using a microphone array attached to a high-speed aircraft or ground vehicle include significant airflow effects. For the purpose of processing the measured NAH data, an improved nearfield acoustical holography procedure is introduced that includes the effects of a fluid medium moving at a subsonic and uniform velocity. The convective wave equation along with the convective Euler's equation is used to develop the proposed NAH procedure. A mapping function between static and moving fluid medium cases is derived from the convective wave equation. Then, a conventional wave number filter designed for static fluid media is modified to be applicable to the moving fluid cases by applying the mapping function to the static wave number filter. In order to validate the proposed NAH procedure, a monopole simulation at the airflow speed of Mach=-0.6 is conducted. The reconstructed acoustic fields obtained by applying the proposed NAH procedure to the simulation data agree well with directly-calculated acoustic fields. Through an experiment with two loudspeakers performed in a wind tunnel operating at Mach=-0.12, it is shown that the proposed NAH procedure can be also used to reconstruct the sound fields radiated from the two loudspeakers.

A continuous-flow acoustofluidic cytometer for single-cell mechanotyping.

The biophysical properties of cells such as their compressibility have been found to be closely related to disease progression such as cancer development and metastasis. As cancer cells are heterogeneous, rapid and high-throughput evaluation of cell biophysical properties at single-cell resolution is needed to assess their potential as biomarkers for cancer staging and prognosis. Acoustofluidics has shown promise as a contactless method for accurately measuring cell biophysical properties; however, previously reported methods had relatively low throughput due to their requirement of no-flow conditions. This work presents a high-throughput continuous flow-based acoustofluidic cell mechanotyping method at single-cell resolution that retains the advantage of simplicity and low-cost.

Microfluidic acoustophoretic force based low-concentration oil separation and detection from the environment.

Detecting and quantifying extremely low concentrations of oil from the environment have broad applications in oil spill monitoring in ocean and coastal areas as well as in oil leakage monitoring on land. Currently available methods for low-concentration oil detection are bulky or costly with limited sensitivities. Thus they are difficult to be used as portable and field-deployable detectors in the case of oil spills or for monitoring the long-term effects of dispersed oil on marine and coastal ecosystems. Here, we present a low-concentration oil droplet trapping and detection microfluidic system based on the acoustophoresis phenomenon where oil droplets in water having a negative acoustic contrast factor move towards acoustic pressure anti-nodes. By trapping oil droplets from water samples flowing through a microfluidic channel, even very low concentrations of oil droplets can be concentrated to a detectable level for further analyses, which is a significant improvement over currently available oil detection systems. Oil droplets in water were successfully trapped and accumulated in a circular acoustophoretic trapping chamber of the microfluidic device and detected using a custom-built compact fluorescent detector based on the natural fluorescence of the trapped crude oil droplets. After the on-line detection, crude oil droplets released from the trapping chamber were successfully separated into a collection outlet by acoustophoretic force for further off-chip analyses. The developed microfluidic system provides a new way of trapping, detecting, and separating low-concentration crude oil from environmental water samples and holds promise as a low-cost field-deployable oil detector with extremely high sensitivity. The microfluidic system and operation principle are expected to be utilized in a wide range of applications where separating, concentrating, and detecting small particles having a negative acoustic contrast factor are required.

Compensation for source nonstationarity in multireference, scan-based near-field acoustical holography.

Multireference, scan-based near-field acoustical holography is a useful measurement tool that can be applied when an insufficient number of microphones is available to make measurements on a complete hologram surface simultaneously. The scan-based procedure can be used to construct a complete hologram by joining together subholograms captured using a relatively small, roving scan array and a fixed reference array. For the procedure to be successful, the source levels must remain stationary for the time taken to record the complete hologram; that is unlikely to be the case in practice, however. Usually, the reference signal levels measured during each scan differ from each other with the result that spatial noise is added to the hologram. A procedure to suppress the effects of source level, and hence reference level, variations is proposed here. The procedure is based on a formulation that explicitly features the acoustical transfer functions between the sources and both the reference and scanning, field microphones. When it is assumed that source level changes do not affect the sources' directivity, a nonstationarity compensation procedure can be derived that is based on measured transfer functions between the reference and field microphones. It has been verified both experimentally and in numerical simulations that the proposed procedure can help suppress spatially distributed noise caused by the type of source level nonstationarity that is characteristic of realistic sources.