An analytical study of the acoustic force implication on the settling velocity of non‐spherical particles in the incompressible Newtonian fluid

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, the effect of the acoustic radiation force on the acceleration motion of a vertically falling non‐spherical particle in the incompressible Newtonian fluid is investigated. The using of the acoustic radiation force for increasing the falling velocity of particles (especially non‐spherical particles) has the most important implication on increasing the efficiency of particulate control devices such as gravity settling chambers. In this study, the motion of the non‐spherical particles in the fluids such as water can be described by the force balance equation (Basset–Boussinesq–Ossen equation) plus the acoustic radiation force term. The main difficulty in the solution of this equation lies in the nonlinear term due to the nonlinearity nature of the drag coefficient. The settling velocity was calculated by using the differential transformation method, which is an analytical solution technique. The effect of some parameters such as the particle's sphericity (0.3, 0.5, and 0.7), the amplitude of the acoustic pressure wave (200, 400, and 600 KPa), the distance from the acoustic pressure node (0.2, 0.4, and 0.6 m), and the acoustic source frequency (20, 40, and 60 KHz) on the settling velocity as a function of time was fully studied in this paper. © 2014 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.