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A Reduced Model Of Cavitation Physics For Use In Sonochemistry, Brian Storey, Andrew Szeri Jul 2012

A Reduced Model Of Cavitation Physics For Use In Sonochemistry, Brian Storey, Andrew Szeri

Brian Storey

Sonochemistry involves focusing acoustic energy through cavitation bubbles to increase chemical activity. The violent bubble collapses lead to temperatures of several thousand kelvin, which drive chemical reactions. In previous work, we gave a detailed computational model of a single bubble collapse, taking into account phase change, mass diffusion, heat diffusion and chemical reactions. All of these phenomena are important in determining the conditions at collapse. The present work involves development of a much simpler model that includes all the physics relevant to the determination of the reaction products. Comparisons with the more detailed computations are made; the reduced model is …


Water Vapour, Sonoluminescence And Sonochemistry, Brian Storey, Andrew Szeri Jul 2012

Water Vapour, Sonoluminescence And Sonochemistry, Brian Storey, Andrew Szeri

Brian Storey

Sonoluminescence is the production of light from acoustically forced bubbles; sonochemistry is a related chemical processing technique. The two phenomena share a sensitive dependence on the liquid phase. The present work is an investigation of the fate and consequences of water vapour in the interior of strongly forced argon micro–bubbles. Due to the extreme nonlinearity of the volume oscillations, excess water vapour is trapped in the bubble during a rapid inertial collapse. Water vapour is prevented from exiting by relatively slow diffusion and non–equilibrium condensation at the bubble wall. By reducing the compression heating of the mixture and through primarily …


Double Layer In Ionic Liquids: Overscreening Versus Crowding, Martin Z. Bazant, Brian D. Storey, Alexei A. Kornyshev Jul 2012

Double Layer In Ionic Liquids: Overscreening Versus Crowding, Martin Z. Bazant, Brian D. Storey, Alexei A. Kornyshev

Brian Storey

We develop a simple Landau-Ginzburg-type continuum theory of solvent-free ionic liquids and use it to predict the structure of the electrical double layer. The model captures overscreening from short-range correlations, dominant at small voltages, and steric constraints of finite ion sizes, which prevail at large voltages. Increasing the voltage gradually suppresses overscreening in favor of the crowding of counterions in a condensed inner layer near the electrode. This prediction, the ion profiles, and the capacitance-voltage dependence are consistent with recent computer simulations and experiments on room-temperature ionic liquids, using a correlation length of order the ion size.


Mixture Segregation Within Sonoluminescence Bubbles, Brian D. Storey, Andrew J. Szeri Jul 2012

Mixture Segregation Within Sonoluminescence Bubbles, Brian D. Storey, Andrew J. Szeri

Brian Storey

This paper concerns a relaxation of the assumption of uniform mixture composition in the interior of sonoluminescence bubbles. Intense temperature and pressure gradients within the bubble drive relative mass diffusion which overwhelms diffusion driven by concentration gradients. This thermal and pressure diffusion results in a robust compositional inhomogeneity in the bubble which lasts several orders of magnitude longer than the temperature peak or light pulse at the main collapse of the bubble. This effect has important consequences for control of sonoluminescence, gas dynamics, sonochemistry, and the physics of light production.