Acoustic Levitation

Pretty gnarly. This laboratory is close to my crib.





""Acoustic levitation is a method for suspending matter in a medium by using acoustic radiation pressure from intense sound waves in the medium. Acoustic levitation is possible because of the non-linear effects of intense sound waves.[1]
Some methods can levitate objects without creating sound heard by the human ear such as the one demonstrated at Otsuka Lab,[2] while others produce some audible sound. There are many ways of creating this effect, from creating a wave underneath the object and reflecting it back to its source, to using an acrylic glass tank to create a large acoustic field.
Acoustic levitation is usually used for containerless processing which has become more important of late due to the small size and resistance of microchips and other such things in industry. Containerless processing may also be used for applications requiring very-high-purity materials or chemical reactions too rigorous to happen in a container. This method is harder to control than other methods of containerless processing such as electromagnetic levitation but has the advantage of being able to levitate nonconducting materials.
There is no known theoretical limit to what acoustic levitation can lift given enough vibratory sound, but in practice current technology limits the amount that can be lifted by this force to at most a few kilograms.[3] Acoustic levitators are used mostly in industry and for researchers of anti-gravity effects such as NASA; however some are commercially available to the public.""

 

This should be in the videos forum, but that section is dead and this vid probably wont get the attention and discussion it deserves of it were there

This is pretty cool, how does it work, and how is sound related to it?

 

I'd also be interested to know how it works. It's amazing what we find out now-a-days, i would have been the last one to guess that sound could do something like that!

 

What!? This can't be real haha... that's cool man Especially with the water droplets.

 

I added a quote from Wikipedia into the original post that does a decent job of explaining.

 

Seems interesting enough - a friend of my dad's had a table that levitated magnetically or something of the sort in order to stay stable even when there were slight vibrations in the building or ground outside. I suppose it's kinda for the same purpose

 

Yeah I thought the water droplets were amazing to watch.

Damn science, you're so cool. Why can't you be like this when I attended science at school?!

 

Woah. WTF. That's cool. I saw a video like this except they weren't suspended. They were using different decibels to make water drip slower or something.

 

Its amazing what they can do with vibrations. That is how plastic is put together essentially, like the end of a tube of toothpaste, opposite the cap side, they push them close together and vibrate it super super fast and it basically welds together.

 

That's fascinating, I did not know that. Ever see something get friction welded? That shit's cool too.