Articles techniques et présentations

Understanding the interactions between microbubbles and surfaces is key to the successful deployment of microbubbles in a range of applications. Two important examples are their use as a drug delivery mechanism, and their potential use of acoustically-driven bubbles as microscale sensors. Drug delivery with bubbles involves sonication at high frequency close to a boundary, and sensing with bubbles typically involves deploying the bubbles in microchannels. In a joint project with Oxford and UCL, researchers at the National Physical Laboratory are developing a new instrument for microbubble characterization: NPL sono-optical tweezers. This work presents an axisymmetric finite element model of a bubble undergoing sonication near to a wall. The model couples two COMSOL Multiphysics® modules to exploit the strengths of each module in the region where the capabilities of that module are key.