Ultrasound, cavitating

When a liquid-solid interface is subjected to ultrasound, cavitation still occurs, but with major changes in the nature of the bubble collapse. If the surface is significantly larger than the cavitating bubble (% 100 pm at 20 kHz), spherical implosion of the cavity no longer occurs, but instead there is a markedly asymmetric collapse which generates a jet of liquid directed at the surface, as seen directly in high speed... 

Depending on the particular type of bubbles, ultrasound cavitation can be transient or stable. In the transient type, also known as inertial cavitation, bubbles are either voids or vapour bubbles, which are believed to be produoed by intensities above 10 W/cm. They exist for one, or at most a few aooustic cycles, and expand to a radius of at least twice their initial size before collapsing abruptly on oompression and often disintegrating into small bubbles. The smaller bubbles formed can act as nuclei for further bubbles or, if their radius is sufficiently small, they can simply dissolve into the bulk solution under the aotion of the very large surface tension forces present. The lifetime of transient bubbles is believed to be too short to allow any mass flow by diffusion of gas into or out of the bubbles by contrast, evaporation and condensation of liquid are believed to ocour freely. In the absence of gas to cushion the implosion, the bubbles will collapse highly abruptly. 

Figure 3.8. (A) Analogy between ultrasound cavitation and microwave heating. (B) Soheme of the devloe for US-assIsted miorowave digestion. (Reproduoed with permission of Elsevier, Ref [67].)...

Many methods have been reported for production of nanodiamonds (NDs) such as laser ablation, " plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition," autoclave synthesis from supercritical fluids, ion irradiation of graphite, chlorination of carbides, electron irradiation of carbon onions, and ultrasound cavitation. Smaller NDs can be prepared by detonation processes that yield aggregates of NDs with sizes of 4-5 nm embedded in a detonation soot composed of other carbon allotropes and impurities. An explosive mixture having an overall negative oxygen balance provides a source of both carbon and energy for the conversion. Because of their small size (2-10 nm) detonation NDs have also been referred to as ultradispersed, nanocrystalline... 

Fig. 2 shows the entrance die pressure and power consumption for various wt% loadings of CNTs as a function of ultrasonic amplitude. The measured pressure is before the ultrasonic treatment of PEI/MWNT composites. A continuous decrease in pressure with increasing ultrasonic amplitude was observed. This is from a combination of heating from dissipated energy from ultrasound, cavitational effect from ultrasonic waves leading to some thixotropic and permanent changes in polymer, reduction in friction at die walls and horn surfaces due to ultrasonic vibrations and possible shear thinning effect created by ultrasound waves. The die... 

Birkin P R, O Connor R, Rapple C and SilvaMartinez S 1998 Electrochemical measurement of erosion from individual cavitation events generated from continuous ultrasound J. Chem. See., Faraday Trans. 94 3365... 

The phenomenon of acoustic cavitation results in an enormous concentration of energy. If one considers the energy density in an acoustic field that produces cavitation and that in the coUapsed cavitation bubble, there is an amplification factor of over eleven orders of magnitude. The enormous local temperatures and pressures so created result in phenomena such as sonochemistry and sonoluminescence and provide a unique means for fundamental studies of chemistry and physics under extreme conditions. A diverse set of apphcations of ultrasound to enhancing chemical reactivity has been explored, with important apphcations in mixed-phase synthesis, materials chemistry, and biomedical uses. 

A. A. Atchley and L. A. Crum, Acoustic cavitation and bubble dynamics, in Ultrasound, its Chemical, Physical and Biological Effect, K. S. Suslick, ed, VCH, New York (1988). 

The role of cavitation in ultrasound degradation has been confirmed repeatably in most experiments where cavitation was prevented, either by applying an external hydrostatic pressure, by degassing the solution, by reducing the sound intensity or the temperature, polymer chain scission was also largely suppressed [117]. 

The use of ultrasonic (US) radiation (typical range 20 to 850 kHz) to accelerate Diels-Alder reactions is undergoing continuous expansion. There is a parallelism between the ultrasonic and high pressure-assisted reactions. Ultrasonic radiations induce cavitation, that is, the formation and the collapse of microbubbles inside the liquid phase which is accompanied by the local generation of high temperature and high pressure [29]. Snyder and coworkers [30] published the first ultrasound-assisted Diels-Alder reactions that involved the cycloadditions of o-quinone 37 with appropriate dienes 38 to synthesize abietanoid diterpenes A-C (Scheme 4.7) isolated from the traditional Chinese medicine, Dan Shen, prepared from the roots of Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge. 

An interesting way to retard catalyst deactivation is to expose the reaction mixture to ultrasound. Ultrasound treatment of the mixture creates local hot spots, which lead to the formation of cavitation bubbles. These cavitation bubbles bombard the solid, dirty surface leading to the removal of carbonaceous deposits [38]. The ultrasound source can be inside the reactor vessel (ultrasound stick) or ultrasound generators can be placed in contact with the wall of the reactor. Both designs work in practice, and the catalyst lifetime can be essentially prolonged, leading to process intensification. The effects of ultrasound are discussed in detail in a review article [39]. 

Ultrasound can thus be used to enhance kinetics, flow, and mass and heat transfer. The overall results are that organic synthetic reactions show increased rate (sometimes even from hours to minutes, up to 25 times faster), and/or increased yield (tens of percentages, sometimes even starting from 0% yield in nonsonicated conditions). In multiphase systems, gas-liquid and solid-liquid mass transfer has been observed to increase by 5- and 20-fold, respectively [35]. Membrane fluxes have been enhanced by up to a factor of 8 [56]. Despite these results, use of acoustics, and ultrasound in particular, in chemical industry is mainly limited to the fields of cleaning and decontamination [55]. One of the main barriers to industrial application of sonochemical processes is control and scale-up of ultrasound concepts into operable processes. Therefore, a better understanding is required of the relation between a cavitation coUapse and chemical reactivity, as weU as a better understanding and reproducibility of the influence of various design and operational parameters on the cavitation process. Also, rehable mathematical models and scale-up procedures need to be developed [35, 54, 55]. 

To find the effect of reaction temperature and ultrasoimd for the preparation of nickel powders, hydrothermal reductions were performed at 60 °C, 70 °C and 80 °C for various times by using the conventional and ultrasonic hydrothermal reduction method. Table 1 shows that the induction time, when starts turning the solution s color to black, decreases with increasing the reaction temperature in both the method. The induction time in the ultrasonic method was relatively shorter, compared to the conventional one. It assumes that hydrothermal reduction is faster in the ultrasonic method than the conventional one due to the cavitation effect of ultrasound. 

Sonochemistry started in 1927 when Richards and Loomis [173] first described chemical reactions brought about by ultrasonic waves, but rapid development of ultrasound in chemistry really only began in the 1980s. Over the past decades there has been a remarkable expansion in the use of ultrasound as an energy source to produce bond scission and to promote or modify chemical reactivity. Although acoustic cavitation plays... 

Abstract Acoustic cavitation is the formation and collapse of bubbles in liquid irradiated by intense ultrasound. The speed of the bubble collapse sometimes reaches the sound velocity in the liquid. Accordingly, the bubble collapse becomes a quasi-adiabatic process. The temperature and pressure inside a bubble increase to thousands of Kelvin and thousands of bars, respectively. As a result, water vapor and oxygen, if present, are dissociated inside a bubble and oxidants such as OH, O, and H2O2 are produced, which is called sonochemical reactions. The pulsation of active bubbles is intrinsically nonlinear. In the present review, fundamentals of acoustic cavitation, sonochemistry, and acoustic fields in sonochemical reactors have been discussed. 

When the instantaneous local pressure becomes negative in liquid irradiated by ultrasound, bubbles are generated because gas such as air dissolved in the liquid can no longer be dissolved in the liquid under negative pressure, which is called acoustic cavitation [5, 6]. For a static condition, vapor bubbles are generated when the static pressure is lower than the saturated vapor pressure, which is called boiling. In many cases of acoustic cavitation, the instantaneous local pressure should be negative because the duration of low pressure is short. 

In Fig. 1.1, the parameter space for transient and stable cavitation bubbles is shown in R0 (ambient bubble radius) - pa (acoustic amplitude) plane [15]. The ambient bubble radius is defined as the bubble radius when an acoustic wave (ultrasound) is absent. The acoustic amplitude is defined as the pressure amplitude of an acoustic wave (ultrasound). Here, transient and stable cavitation bubbles are defined by their shape stability. This is the result of numerical simulations of bubble pulsations. Above the thickest line, bubbles are those of transient cavitation. Below the thickest line, bubbles are those of stable cavitation. Near the left upper side, there is a region for bubbles of high-energy stable cavitation designated by Stable (strong nf0) . In the brackets, the type of acoustic cavitation noise is indicated. The acoustic cavitation noise is defined as acoustic emissions from... 

Fig. 1.2 Numerically simulated frequency spectra of the hydrophone signal due to acoustic cavitation noise. The driving ultrasound is 515 kHz in frequency and 2.6 bar in pressure amplitude, (a) For stable cavitation bubbles of 1.5 pm in ambient radius, (b) For transient cavitation bubbles of 3 pm in ambient radius. Reprinted from Ultrasonics Sonochemistry, vol. 17, K. Yasui, T. Tuziuti, J. Lee, T. Kozuka, A. Towata, and Y. lida, Numerical simulations of acoustic cavitation noise with the temporal fluctuation in the number of bubbles, pp. 460-472, Copyright (2010), with permission from Elsevier...

---