An efficient procedure to predict the acoustophoresis of axisymmetric irregular particles above ultrasound transducer array

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-analytical, efficient method to predict the acoustophoresis of axisymmetric irregular particles using a conformal transformation approach, emphasizing geometric features' influence on scattering and force.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel semi-analytical framework that accurately models radiation forces on irregular axisymmetric particles, significantly improving computational efficiency over full numerical methods.

Findings

Method achieves over 100x faster computation than full numerical solutions.

Geometric features significantly influence particle trajectories in acoustophoretic processes.

The approach accurately captures the effects of particle shape and orientation on scattering and forces.

Abstract

Acoustic radiation force and torque arising from wave scattering are able to translate and rotate matter without contact. However, the existing research mainly focused on manipulating simple symmetrical geometries, neglecting the significance of geometric features. For the non-spherical geometries, the shape of the object strongly affects its scattering properties, and thus the radiation force and torque as well as the acoustophoretic process. Here, we develop a semi-analytical framework to calculate the radiation force and torque exerted on the axisymmetric particles excited by a user-customized transducer array based on a conformal transformation approach, capturing the significance of the geometric features. The derivation framework is established under the computation coordinate system (CCS), whereas the particle is assumed to be static. For the dynamic processes, the rotation of particle is converted as the opposite rotation of transducer array, achieved by employing a rotation transformation to tune the incident driving field in the CCS. Later, the obtained radiation force and torque in the CCS should be transformed back to the observation coordinate system (OCS) for force and torque analysis. The radiation force and torque exerted on particles with different orientations are validated by comparing the full three-dimensional numerical solution in different phase distributions. It is found that the proposed method presents superior computational accuracy, high geometric adaptivity, and good robustness to various geometric features, while the computational efficiency is more than 100 times higher than that of the full numerical method. Furthermore, it is found that the dynamic trajectories of particles with different geometric features are completely different, indicating that the geometric features can be a potential degree of freedom to tune acoustophoretic process.