Manipulating bubbles with secondary Bjerknes forces

Abstract

Gas bubbles in a sound field are submitted to a radiative force, known as the secondary Bjerknes force. We propose an original experimental setup that allows us to investigate in details this force between two bubbles, as a function of the sonication frequency, as well as the bubbles radii and distance. We report the observation of both attractive and, more interestingly, repulsive Bjerknes force, when the two bubbles are driven in antiphase. Our experiments show the importance of taking multiple scattering into account, which leads to a strong acoustic coupling of the bubbles when their radii are similar. Our setup demonstrates the accuracy of secondary Bjerknes forces for attracting or repealing a bubble, and could lead to new acoustic tools for non contact manipulation in microfluidic devices.

4 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Observation of a single-beam gradient force acoustical trap for elastic particles: acoustical tweezers
• Fast acoustic tweezers for the two-dimensional manipulation of individual particles in microfluidic channels
• Time reversal sub-wavelength focusing in bubbly media

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Asymmetricity and sign reversal of secondary Bjerknes force from strong nonlinear coupling in cavitation bubble pairs
• Close-to-touching acoustic subwavelength resonators: eigenfrequency separation and gradient blow-up
• Modeling frequency shifts of collective bubble resonances with the boundary element method
• Spectrally-wide acoustic frequency combs generated using oscillations of polydisperse gas bubble clusters in liquids
• Acoustic resonance by fish schools. A proposal for the schooling mechanism