Paper detail

Interacting bubble clouds and their sonochemical production

Acoustically driven air pockets trapped in artificial crevices on a sur- face can emit bubbles which organize in (interacting) bubble clusters. With increasing driving power Fernandez Rivas et al. [Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2010] observed three different behaviors: clusters close to the very pits out of which they had been created, clusters pointing toward each other, and merging clusters. The latter behavior is highly undesired for technological purposes as it is associated with a reduction of the radical production and an enhancement of the erosion of the reactor walls. The dependence on the control parameters such as the distance of the pits and the conditions for cluster-merging are examined. The underlying mechanism, governed by the secondary Bjerknes forces, turns out to be strongly influenced by the nonlinearity of the bubble oscillations and not directly by the number of nucleated bubbles. The Bjerknes forces are found to dampen the bubble oscillations, thus reducing the radical production. Therefore, the increased number of bubbles at high power could be the key to understand the experimental observation that, after a certain power threshold, any further increase of the driving does not improve the sonochemical efficiency.