Acoustic microstreaming due to an oscillating microbubble is analytically investigated to obtain the circular streaming motion adjacent to a nearby wall. Classical theory due to Nyborg is carefully derived in the radial coordinates. The theory is used to obtain the flow field and the vortical motion caused by the microbubble motion. The length of the vertices are decreasing when the microbubble is excited at distances close to the rigid wall, while the maximum shear stress is increasing.

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The hydrodynamic behavior of the fluid around a cavitation bubble located above a rigid boundary is investigated numerically. The liquid around the cavitation bubble is assumed to be incompressible, inviscid and irrotatational and surface tension is assumed to be negligible. Boundary-integral-equation and finite-difference methods are employed to study the problem. Three cases are investigated: (1) when the Bjerknes force is negligible in comparison with the buoyancy force, (2) when the buoyancy force is negligible in comparison with the Bjerknes force, (3) when the Bjerknes attraction force through the rigid surface and the buoyancy force are comparable. It is shown that during the collapse phase in the third case, an annular liquid jet develops around the bubble, causing it to take the shape of an hour-glass. This phenomenon is called necking which is followed by splitting the bubble into two parts. Features to note are the large lateral pressures and the high relative velocities of the fluid particles near the annular liquid jet of the bubble. This large lateral pressure may be the cause of bubble collapse. The velocity field of the liquid domain around the two parts of the cavitation bubble after splitting shows that a stagnation point exists between the two parts of the bubble. Because of the unsteady nature of the problem, the stagnation point and the point of maximum pressure do not coincide.

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Subharmonic response from contrast microbubbles as a function of ambient overpressure is numerically investigated for subharmonic aided noninvasive estimation of local organ level blood pressure. Three different interfacial rheological models for the encapsulation is used with material parameters appropriate for a common lipid coated contrast agent Sonazoid. The subharmonic response is seen to either decrease, increase or vary nonmonotonically with increasing ambient pressure. Compared to a free microbubbles important differences arise due to the encapsulation. Specifically due to the enhanced damping due to encapsulation, the range of excitation over which subharmonic is seen is broader than that in free microbubbles. This results in different trends of subharmonic response at the same excitation frequency for different excitation pressures. The observed behaviors are explained by investigating subharmonic generation threshold and resonance frequency.