ACOUSTIC RADIATION PRESSURE

Acoustic radiation pressure is an area in nonlinear acoustics that has been associated with a. lot of confusion and controversy since the work by Lord Rayleigh. From the more recent works, it would appear that all the pieces necessary for a complete understanding of this topic exist. The purpose of this work is to put the pieces together and systematically present a coherent picture of the subject, starting from the first principles. The approach is based on the perturbation technique. Self-consistency will be emphasized. Therefore, although the Eulerian coordinates will mainly be used to formulate the problem, which will be shown to be very simple and straightforward, it will also be demonstrated how the same results can easily be obtained by using the more traditional Lagrangian coordinates, if the latter are applicable. It will also be argued that it is simpler to define Rayleigh and Langevin radiation pressures according to whether or not the system is subjected to a constraint.