Flow patterns and transport in Rayleigh surface acoustic wave streaming: combined finite element method and raytracing numerics versus experiments

This work presents an approach for determining the streaming patterns that are generated by Rayleigh surface acoustic waves in arbitrary 3-D geometries by finite element method (FEM) simulations. An efficient raytracing algorithm is applied on the acoustic subproblem to avoid the unbearable memory demands and computational time of a conventional FEM acoustics simulation in 3-D. The acoustic streaming interaction is modeled by a body force term in the Stokes equation. In comparisons between experiments and simulated flow patterns, we demonstrate the quality of the proposed technique.