Diversity of acoustic streaming in a rectangular acoustofluidic field

• A 2D rectangular acoustofluidic field with a traveling wave is analyzed.
• The acoustic streaming field has a diversified pattern.
• The vibration source’s size, topology and working conditions cause the diversity.
• A small particle in the acoustofluidic field may affect the acoustic streaming field.
• The working temperature may affect the size and velocity of the acoustic streaming.

Diversity of acoustic streaming field in a 2D rectangular chamber with a traveling wave and using water as the acoustic medium is numerically investigated by the finite element method. It is found that the working frequency, the vibration excitation source length, and the distance and phase difference between two separated symmetric vibration excitation sources can cause the diversity in the acoustic streaming pattern. It is also found that a small object in the acoustic field results in an additional eddy, and affects the eddy size in the acoustic streaming field. In addition, the computation results show that with an increase of the acoustic medium’s temperature, the speed of the main acoustic streaming decreases first and then increases, and the angular velocity of the corner eddies increases monotonously, which can be clearly explained by the change of the acoustic dissipation factor and shearing viscosity of the acoustic medium with temperature. Commercialized FEM software COMSOL Multiphysics is used to implement the computation tasks, which makes our method very easy to use. And the computation method is partially verified by an established analytical solution.