Scale-Up of Sonochemical Reactors

The various advantages of using ultrasound (as can be inferred from Table 22.1) notwithstanding, sonochemistry continues to be a laboratory curiosity with few industrial applications. The chief reasons are the lack of a scale-up rationale and economics. 

Large-scale batch sonochemical reactors can be designed on the basis of the performance of conventional laboratory sonicators if it is assumed that there are no serious scale-up factors. These are the cleaning bath reactors (indirect sonication) and reactors with immersible transducers or sonic probes (direct sonication). Continuous reactors use either wall-mounted transducers (indirect sonication) or sonic probes (direct sonication). 

Based on what is known so far, the volume of any sonochemical reactor can only be fixed arithmetically to meet a given production capacity. It is not possible to compute the reaction time for a given volume, or vice versa, even assuming that the Arrhenius parameters are known, because the actual temperature and the cavitational field within the reactor would be unknown. An approximate procedure is suggested here. Attempts to map the cavitational and energy fields are briefly discussed in a later section. 

As a first step, based on laboratory-scale data at different times, a rate equation can be developed and then the batch reactor performance equation 

The next step is the design of the ultrasound part of the reactor system. For this, we 

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Destaillats H, Lesko TM, Knowlton M, Wallace H, Hoffmann MR. Scale-up of sonochemical reactors for water treatment. Ind Eng Chem Res 2001 40 3855-3860. 

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