Bubble Manipulation by Self Organization of Bubbles inside Ultrasonic Wave

Abstract

Microbubble manipulation using ultrasonic waves is a promising technology in the fields of future medicine and biotechnology. For example, it is considered that bubble trapping using ultrasonic waves may play an important role in drug or gene delivery systems in order to trap the drugs or genes in the diseased tissue. Usually, when bubbles are designed so that they carry payloads, such as drug or gene, they tend to be harder than free bubbles. These hard bubbles receive a small acoustic radiation force, which is not sufficient for bubble manipulation. In this paper, a novel method of microbubble manipulation using ultrasonic waves is proposed. This method uses seed bubbles in order to manipulate target bubbles. When the seed bubbles are introduced into the ultrasonic wave field, they start to oscillate to produce a bubble aggregation of a certain size. Then the target bubbles are introduced, the target bubbles attach around the seed bubbles producing a bubble mass with bilayers (inner layer: seed bubbles, outer layer: target bubbles). The target bubbles are manipulated as a bilayered bubble mass. Basic experiments are carried out using polyvinyl chloride (PVC) shell bubbles. No target bubbles are trapped when only the target bubbles are introduced. However, they are trapped if the seed bubbles are introduced in advance.