Acoustic levitation [Resources]

New resources at BAS: acoustic, multimodal, linguistic

Four new speech corpora have been added to the catalogue and will be briefly described. The BAS pronunciation dictionary PHONOLEX was extended by two new types of entries: empirically detected pronunciation variants and empirically collected word entries. Details will be given about the new Verbmobil II speech resources soon available via BAS and the European SpeechDat Car data collection. Apar...

Inertial levitation

We consider the steady levitation of a rigid plate on a thin air cushion with prescribed injection velocity. This injection velocity is assumed to be much larger than that in a conventional Prandtl boundary layer, so that inertial effects dominate. After applying the classical ‘blowhard’ theory of Cole & Aroesty (1968) to the two-dimensional version of the problem, it is shown that in three dim...

" Bernoulli " Levitation

“Bernoulli” levitation is the basis of many popular counter-intuitive physics demonstrations. However, few of these lend themselves to a quantitative description without recourse to computational fluid dynamics. Levitation of a flat plate is the exception, and we present here a straightforward analysis which illustrates several principles of fluid mechanics in a pedagogically useful way.

Effects of acoustic levitation on the development of zebrafish, Danio rerio, embryos

Acoustic levitation provides potential to characterize and manipulate material such as solid particles and fluid in a wall-less environment. While attempts to levitate small animals have been made, the biological effects of such levitation have been scarcely documented. Here, our goal was to explore if zebrafish embryos can be levitated (peak pressures at the pressure node and anti-node: 135 dB...

Self-running and self-floating two-dimensional actuator using near-field acoustic levitation