Inconsistencies in the Notions of Acoustic Stress and Streaming

Inviscid hydrodynamics mediates forces through pressure and other, typically irrotational, external forces. Acoustically induced forces must be consistent with arising from such a pressure field. The use of “acoustic stress” is shown to have inconsistencies with such an analysis and generally arise from mathematical expediency but poor overall conceptualization of such systems. This contention is further supported by the poor agreement of experiment in many such approaches. The notion of momentum as being an intrinsic property of sound waves is similarly found to be paradoxical. Through an analysis that includes viscosity and attenuation, we conclude that all acoustic streaming must arise from vorticity introduced by viscous forces at the driver or other solid boundaries and that calculations with acoustic stress should be replaced with ones using a nonlinear correction to the overall pressure field.