Selective particle control in suspensions using multi-wavelength resonators: Towards acoustophoresis on centimeter scale

Particulate suspensions occur in many different industrial activities, for example in food, biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. These suspensions usually need a treatment step to separate valuable particles from the wet process streams or purify the streams. Such treatments may be needed at any stage during the process. Many technologies exist to perform such treatments. A relatively recent technology is acoustophoresis. Acoustophoresis is widely and successfully used in biomedical applications on microscale. For biomedical applications, such as blood cell separation for diagnosis, microscale has a size advantage as it reduces the required sample size, typically in the order of mL. For other applications, however, when the volumes to be treated are larger, for instance in the order of L h-1, selective particle separation from suspensions on centimeter scale can be a viable option. This thesis investigated and laid down the path towards realizing selective particle separation on centimeter scale.