Interaction of foreign bodies in liquid caused by the acoustic radiation field

Abstract

The problem of interaction of two foreign bodies placed in a liquid in an acoustic field propagating along the line connecting the bodies is under investigation. An approach is elaborated to characterize the interaction between the bodies caused by the acoustic radiation forces that are the time-constant components of hydrodynamic forces acting upon the bodies located in the outer liquidmedium. For example of the method application, propagation of the plane acoustic wave along the center line of two liquid spherical drops placed into a space filled with another liquid is under investigation. Study of the acoustic radiation forces is performed in the frame of two-step procedure. The first step comprises solution of the linear problem of incident wave diffraction on the bodies.The problem is solved by the variable separation method. To satisfy the boundary conditions on spherical surfaces, the expansion of the incident and reflected wave potentials over the spherical wave functions are used. The second step is calculation of the hydrodynamic forces acting upon each body followed by time averaging of forces determined. The analytical formula for the acoustic radiation force calculation is derived for the case under consideration.It is established that value of the acoustic radiation force affecting each liquid drop depends significantly on the incident wave frequency, densities, speed of sound in the outer and internal liquid as well as on the radius and distance between drops.