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Transient effects in the translation of bubbles insonated with acoustic pulses of finite duration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2017

Elena Igualada-Villodre
Affiliation:
Fluid Mechanics Group, Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, Madrid, 28911, Spain
Ana Medina-Palomo
Affiliation:
Fluid Mechanics Group, Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, Madrid, 28911, Spain
Patricia Vega-Martínez
Affiliation:
Fluid Mechanics Group, Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, Madrid, 28911, Spain
Javier Rodríguez-Rodríguez*
Affiliation:
Fluid Mechanics Group, Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, Madrid, 28911, Spain
*
†Email address for correspondence: javier.rodriguez@uc3m.es

Abstract

The translation of a bubble under the action of an acoustic forcing finds applications in fields ranging from drug delivery to sonoluminescence. This phenomenon has been widely studied for cases where the amplitude of the forcing remains constant over time. However, in many practical applications, the duration of the forcing is not long enough for the bubble to attain a constant translational velocity, mainly due to the effect of the history force. Here, we develop a formulation, valid in the limit of very viscous flow and small-amplitude acoustic forcing, that allows us to describe the transient dynamics of bubbles driven by acoustic pulses consisting of finite numbers of cycles. We also present an asymptotic solution to this theory for the case of a finite-duration sinusoidal pressure pulse. This solution takes into account both the history integral term and the transient period that the bubble needs to achieve steady radial oscillations, the former being dominant during most of the acceleration process. Moreover, by introducing some additional assumptions, we derive a simplified formula that describes the time evolution of the bubble velocity fairly well. Using this solution, we show that the convergence to the steady translational velocity, given by the so-called Bjerknes force, occurs rather slowly, namely as $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}^{-1/2}$ , where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}$ is the time made dimensionless with the viscous time scale of the bubble, which explains the slow convergence of the bubble velocity and stresses the importance of taking the history force into account.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Copyright
© 2017 Cambridge University Press 
Figure 0

Figure 1.(a) Sketch of the experimental set-up. The dimensions of the pool are $100\times 40\times 40~\text{cm}^{3}$ and the distance between the electrode and the transducer is 6.5 cm. The frame rate of the movie (acquired with a high-speed Memrecam HX-3 camera) is 100 000 fps. (b) Frame of a high-speed movie which illustrates the trajectory followed by two bubbles, with equilibrium radii around $R_{0}=20{-}25~\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}\text{m}$, rising in water and travelling in the horizontal direction under the effect of an ultrasound pulse. (c) The acoustic signal corresponding to the experiment shown in (b).

Figure 1

Figure 2.(a) The experimental velocity of a bubble, with radius $R_{0}=15.6~\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}\text{m}$ (experiment 5 of table 1), along the direction of propagation of the acoustic wave. The red circles are velocities measured during the acoustic pulse and the blue squares are velocities during the deceleration stage. The dashed and dash-dotted lines represent the deceleration calculated assuming a constant drag coefficient, namely $\boldsymbol{F}_{drag}=-C_{d}\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}R_{0}\boldsymbol{V}$, which yields $V/V_{0}=\exp (-3C_{d}\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}t/2\unicode[STIX]{x03C0}R_{0}^{2})$ for the evolution of the velocity. The red dashed line represents $C_{d}=12\unicode[STIX]{x03C0}$ and the blue dash-dotted line $C_{d}=4\unicode[STIX]{x03C0}$. (b) The same plot, but in semi-logarithmic coordinates, to evidence that no single value of $C_{d}$ can describe the experimental data well, as the bubble sustains its velocity for a very large time.

Figure 2

Table 1.Experimental conditions of the bubble translation experiments. For all cases, the acoustic pulse is the same: $f=1$ MHz, 100 cycles and $p_{A}=1~\text{MPa}$.

Figure 3

Figure 3.(a) Comparison between the analytical solution (light blue dashed curve) and the numerical one (dark blue solid line) of the full problem for case I. (b) Period-averaged velocities. Here, we also show the solution corresponding to the simplified problem without the memory term (black dash-dotted line) and the simplified asymptotic solution for the acceleration process (red dotted line), described in § 5.1. From the point where the pulse stops ($\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}\approx 70$) onwards, two sets of curves are shown; one corresponds to the actual finite-duration pulse, whereas the other corresponds to a permanent insonation. (c,d) Two magnifications of (a) corresponding to short and long times.

Figure 4

Table 2.The dimensionless parameters and characteristic variables corresponding to the three cases considered. For all of the cases, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}=0.0728~\text{N}~\text{m}^{-1}$, $c=1485~\text{m}~\text{s}^{-1}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D705}=1.4$.

Figure 5

Figure 4.Comparison between the analytical solution and the numerical one of the full problem for case II. See the caption of figure 3 for an explanation of the different plots. Remarkably, although the amplitude of the oscillations is not well captured due to the relatively high amplitude of the forcing, the mean velocity of the asymptotic solution still agrees fairly well with the full numerical one.

Figure 6

Figure 5.Comparison between the analytical solution and the numerical one of the full problem for case III. See the caption of figure 3 for an explanation of the different plots.

Figure 7

Figure 6.The time evolution of the radial oscillations (a,c,e) and their time derivatives (b,d,f) for the three cases detailed in table 2 (blue solid lines). Panels (a,c,e) also show the radial oscillation computed with the linearized equation (5.2) (cyan dashed lines).

Figure 8

Figure 7.The time evolution of the velocity after the acoustic pulse for the experiments reported in table 1 (symbols). We compare with the velocities predicted by (2.1) using a constant Stokes drag coefficient $C_{d}=4\unicode[STIX]{x03C0}$ (dash-dotted blue line) and a coefficient $C_{d}=12\unicode[STIX]{x03C0}$ (dashed red line), as well as with the analytical expressions taking into account memory effects: (6.3) (solid grey line) and the simplified formula valid for long times, (6.4) (green dotted line), described in § 5.1.