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Acoustic propulsion of a small, bottom-heavy sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2020

François Nadal*
Affiliation:
Wolfson School of Mechanical Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, LoughboroughLE11 3TU, UK
Sébastien Michelin
Affiliation:
LadHyX – Département de Mécanique, CNRS – École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 91128Palaiseau, France
*
† Email address for correspondence: F.R.Nadal@lboro.ac.uk

Abstract

We present here a comprehensive derivation for the speed of a small bottom-heavy sphere forced by a transverse acoustic field and thereby establish how density inhomogeneities may play a critical role in acoustic propulsion. The sphere is trapped at the pressure node of a standing wave whose wavelength is much larger than the sphere diameter. Due to its inhomogeneous density, the sphere oscillates in translation and rotation relative to the surrounding fluid. The perturbative flows induced by the sphere’s rotation and translation are shown to generate a rectified inertial flow responsible for a net mean force on the sphere that is able to propel the particle within the zero-pressure plane. To avoid an explicit derivation of the streaming flow, the propulsion speed is computed exactly using a suitable version of the Lorentz reciprocal theorem. The propulsion speed is shown to scale as the inverse of the viscosity, the cube of the amplitude of the acoustic field and is a non-trivial function of the acoustic frequency. Interestingly, for some combinations of the constitutive parameters (fluid-to-solid density ratio, moment of inertia and centroid to centre of mass distance), the direction of propulsion is reversed as soon as the frequency of the forcing acoustic field becomes larger than a certain threshold. The results produced by the model are compatible with both the observed phenomenology and the orders of magnitude of the measured velocities.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Oscillations of a bottom-heavy sphere forced by a uniform external oscillating flow. Here, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D709}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D71B}$ are the displacement amplitude and frequency of the forcing acoustic field. The radius of the sphere is denoted by $a$, and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FF}$ refers to the centroid-to-centre of mass distance $OG$.

Figure 1

Table 1. List of the five independent parameters of the problem. Note that the Reynolds number $Re=\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}^{2}$, which is supposed to be small compared to unity, is not an independent parameter.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Magnitude (a) and phase (b) of ${\mathcal{I}}$. The bullets correspond to the direct numerical integration of (3.20).

Figure 3

Figure 3. Ratio $\langle v^{(1)}\rangle /\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}$ as a function of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}$ for $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=0.2$ and several combinations of $(I,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})$. (a) $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}=0.9$, $I=0.3,0.6,0.9$; (b) $I=0.3$, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}=0.3,0.6,0.9$. The spheres sketched in panels (a) and (b) illustrate the direction of propulsion when the centre of mass is on the right of the geometric centre (top, $\langle v^{(1)}\rangle /\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}>0$; bottom, $\langle v^{(1)}\rangle /\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}<0$).

Figure 4

Figure 4. Value $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}^{\star }$ corresponding to a reversal of the propulsion direction plotted in the plane $(I,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC})$ for three values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$. (a) $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=0.05$; (b,d) $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=0.2$ (panel d is the same as panel b but plotted in a linear scale); (c) $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}=0.6$. For a fixed value of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$, the frontier between the reversal and the non-reversal regions is given by the equality case of (3.26) (solid red line). The cases considered in figure 3 are specified on panel (d) using white bullets. The colour bar (right) holds for all the figures. The white zones in panels (a), (b) and (c), where $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}^{\star }$ is not computed, come from the practical limitation in the numerical extraction of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}^{\star }$ which tends to infinity in the vicinity of the transition (see text for further explanation).

Figure 5

Figure 5. (a) Ratio $\langle v^{(1)}\rangle /\unicode[STIX]{x1D700}$ as a function of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FD}$ for $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}=2.5$, $I=0.9$ and different values of $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}$.