Hyperthermia effects (39-44°C) induced by pulsed high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) have been regarded as a promising therapeutic tool for boosting immune responses or enhancing drug delivery into a solid tumor. However, previous studies also reported that the cell death occurs when cells are maintained at 43°C for more than 20 minutes. The aim of this study is to investigate thermal responses inside in vivo rabbit auricular veins exposed to pulsed HIFU (1.17 MHz, 5300 W/cm2 , with relatively low-duty ratios (0.2%-4.3%). The results show that: (1) with constant pulse repetition frequency (PRF) (e.g., 1 Hz), the thermal responses inside the vessel will increase with the increasing duty ratio; (2) a temperature elevation to 43°C can be identified at the duty ratio of 4.3%; (3) with constant duty ratios, the change of PRF will not significantly affect the temperature measurement in the vessel; (4) as the duty ratios lower than 4.3%, the presence of microbubbles will not significantly enhance the thermal responses in the vessel, but will facilitate HIFU-induced inertial cavitation events.
Acoustic bands are studied numerically for a Lamb wave propagating in an anti-symmetric structure of a one-dimensional periodic plate by using the method of supercell plane-wave expansion.The results show that all the bands are pinned in pairs at the Brillouin zone boundary as long as the anti-symmetry remains and acoustic band gaps (ABGs) only appear between certain bands.In order to reveal the relationship between the band pinning and the anti-symmetry,the method of eigenmode analysis is introduced to calculate the displacement fields of different plate structures.Further,the method of harmony response analysis is employed to calculate the reference spectra to verify the accuracy of numerical calculations of acoustic band map,and both the locations and widths of ABGs in the acoustic band map are in good agreement with those of the reference spectra.The investigations show that the pinning effect is very sensitive to the anti-symmetry of periodic plates,and by introducing different types of breakages,more ABGs or narrow pass bands will appear,which is meaningful in band gap engineering.
A model is developed to calculate the distribution of first-order velocity field caused by the coupled bubbles in an ultrasound field. Using this model, numerical investigations of velocity field have been made when the two identical bubbles are driven well below resonance by an acoustic field with pressure amplitude exceeding cavitation threshold. Three representative kinestates of the coupled bubbles were chosen for analyzing the velocity distribution of surrounding liquid. The results show that the nonlinear oscillations of a bubble pair affect violently the radial velocity distribution of surrounding liquid, especially in the expanding phase. Symmetry of the tangential velocity distribution implies a possibility of attraction or repulsion of the bubble pairs.
We give an analytical analysis to the acoustic propagation in an acoustic diode (AD) model formed by coupling a superlattice (SL) with a nonlinear medium. Analytical solutions of the acoustic transmission are obtained by studying the propagations in the SL and the nonlinear medium separately with the conventional transfer-matrix method and a perturbation technique. Compared with the previous numerical method, the proposed approach contributes a better physical insight into the intrinsic mechanism of acoustic rectification and helps us to predict the performance of an AD within the effective rectifying bands in a simple way. This is potentially significant for the practical design and fabrication of AD devices.
