Polystyrene clusters captured by acoustic tweezers spontaneously rupturing

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that polystyrene clusters trapped by acoustic tweezers can spontaneously rupture once their size exceeds a certain threshold, influenced by surfactant concentration, revealing new insights into acoustic trapping stability.

Contribution

It introduces the observation that polystyrene clusters in acoustic traps can spontaneously rupture, highlighting size-dependent stability influenced by surfactant concentration.

Findings

Clusters become unstable and rupture spontaneously.

Rupture occurs after exceeding a size threshold.

Surfactant concentration affects trapping stability.

Abstract

Numerous investigations have demonstrated that standing acoustic waves can trap particles that range in size from microns to millimeters. Powerful tweezers may trap clusters of particles rather than single ones because their trapping radius is substantially larger than the size of the trapped particle. In this study, clusters of polystyrene particles measuring 450 microns in size that were suspended in an ionic surfactant solution were trapped at the nodes of acoustic standing waves. The correlation between surfactant concentration and threshold radius is examined, and potential mechanisms that could be responsible for the phenomenon are investigated. The findings demonstrated that adding polystyrene made clusters unstable and caused them to spontaneously rupture. Additionally, studies revealed that the cluster began to undergo spontaneous sequential ruptures after its radius above a particular threshold.