Simulating acoustofluidic particle interactions and unilateral contacts

Abstract eng:
Determining the trajectories of particles in acoustic fields is one of the major challenges of numerical acoustophoresis. Previous work has only focused on determining the trajectory of one single particle or cell in an acoustic field1. Although the forces between multiple small spherical particles can be obtained analytically2, previous research failed to address the unilateral contacts in the trajectories of multiple interacting particles. The aim of this work is to present a method, which allows to compute trajectories of multiple interacting particles in an acoustic field. This goal is achieved by combining acoustic force simulations with a Moreau type time integrator3. The model requires acoustic forces to be determined at each time-step, two different methods are applied and compared. The presented algorithm allows to simulate the motion of particle clumps, effectively explaining phenomena such as particle chain formation and particle clump rotation.

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