Poloidal flow and toroidal particle ring formation in a sessile drop driven by megahertz order vibration.

Abstract

Poloidal flow is curiously formed in a microliter sessile water drop over 157-225 MHz because of acoustic streaming from three-dimensional standing Lamb waves in a lithium niobate substrate. The flow possesses radial symmetry with downwelling at the center and upwelling around the periphery of the drop. Outside this frequency range, the attenuation occurs over a length scale incompatible with the drop size and the poloidal flow vanishes. Remarkably, shear-induced migration was found to drive toroidal particle ring formation with diameters inversely proportional to the frequency of the acoustic irradiation.