Acoustofluidics 13: Analysis of acoustic streaming by perturbation methods

In this Part 13 of the tutorial series "Acoustofluidics--exploiting ultrasonic standing waves forces and acoustic streaming in microfluidic systems for cell and particle manipulation," the streaming phenomenon is presented from an analytical standpoint, and perturbation methods are developed for analyzing such flows.

Acoustic streaming is the phenomenon that takes place when a steady flow field is generated by the absorption of an oscillatory field. This can happen either by attenuation (quartz wind) or by interaction with a boundary. The latter type of streaming can also be generated by an oscillating solid in an otherwise still fluid medium or vibrating enclosure of a fluid body.

While we address the first kind of streaming, our focus is largely on the second kind from a practical standpoint for application to microfluidic systems. In this Focus article, we limit the analysis to one- and two-dimensional problems in order to understand the analytical techniques with examples that most-easily illustrate the streaming phenomenon.