New Directions in Audio and Acoustics Research

Innovative audio and acoustics research projects are opening the door to new applications, in fields ranging from structure analysis to pharmaceutical production to medical analytics, which seemed improbable only a few years ago.

At Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, engineers are listening to highway bridges during rain showers in a quest to detect hidden structural flaws. Meanwhile, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne, National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, are using sound waves to levitate individual pharmaceutical solution droplets. In State College, Pennsylvania, a research team at Pennsylvania State University is using acoustic waves tuned to different frequencies as a set of invisible tweezers to sort a continuous stream of biological cells on a small coin-sized chip.

To learn about these exciting research and more, please read the column article “New Directions in Audio and Acoustics Research” in the July issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.