A comparative study on the modeling of sound pressure field distributions in a sonoreactor with experimental investigation

In sonochemical reactors the effect of emerging cavitation bubbles has significant influence on the amplitude and structure of the developing sound field. Calculations show that the damping parameter and the phase velocity may, depending on the pressure amplitude, change by several orders of magnitude. For example, the sound velocity in water comes to 1500 ms(-1), whereas in a bubbly liquid it may decrease to 20 ms-l, which is much below the velocity of sound in air (about 340 ms(-1)). In this paper, a method of calculating the time dependent three-dimensional pressure field in sonochemical reactors of various shapes is presented. It takes into account inhomogeneous distributed wave parameters which are a function of the spatial depending pressure amplitude. The modeled results are then compared with experimentally measured values of a certain kind of reaction vessel. The agreement is found to be satisfactory. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.