Ultrasound - driven viscous streaming , modelled via momentum injection

Microfluidic devices can use steady streaming caused by the ultrasonic oscillation of one or many gas bubbles in a liquid to drive small scale flow. Such streaming flows are difficult to evaluate, as analytic solutions are not available for any but the simplest cases, and direct computational fluid dynamics models are unsatisfactory due to the large difference in flow velocity between the steady streaming and the leading order oscillatory motion. We develop a numerical technique which uses a two-stage multiscale computational fluid dynamics approach to find the streaming flow as a steady problem, and validate this model against experimental results.