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Sonoluminescence temperatures during multi-bubble cavitation

Nature volume 401, pages 772–775 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

Acoustic cavitation—the formation and implosive collapse of bubbles—occurs when a liquid is exposed to intense sound. Cavitation can produce white noise, sonochemical reactions, erosion of hard materials, rupture of living cells and the emission of light, or sonoluminescence1,2. The concentration of energy during the collapse is enormous: the energy of an emitted photon can exceed the energy density of the sound field by about twelve orders of magnitude3, and it has long been predicted that the interior bubble temperature reaches thousands of degrees Kelvin during collapse. But experimental measurements4,5 of conditions inside cavitating bubbles are scarce, and there have been no studies of interior temperature as a function of experimental parameters. Here we use multi-bubble sonoluminescence from excited states of metal atoms as a spectroscopic probe of temperatures inside cavitating bubbles. The intense atomic emission allows us to change the properties of the gas–vapour mixture within the bubble, and thus vary the effective emission temperature for multi-bubble sonoluminescence from 5,100 to 2,300 K. We observe emission temperatures that are in accord with those expected from compressional heating during cavitation.

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Figure 1: Multi-bubble sonoluminescence (MBSL) emission from excited states of Cr atoms.
Figure 2: Effect of polyatomic gases on the observed emission temperatures from MBSL.
Figure 3: Observed emission temperatures versus gas-mixture polytropic ratios at 298 K.
Figure 4: Effect of solvent vapour pressure on the observed emission temperatures from MBSL.
Figure 5: Effect of dissolved noble gases on the observed emission temperatures from MBSL.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, and in part by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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Author notes

  1. Yuri T. Didenko

    Present address: Pacific Oceanological Institute, Vladivostok, 690061, Russia

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 600 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, 61801, Illinois, USA

    William B. McNamara III, Yuri T. Didenko & Kenneth S. Suslick

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  1. William B. McNamara III
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Correspondence to Kenneth S. Suslick.

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McNamara, W., Didenko, Y. & Suslick, K. Sonoluminescence temperatures during multi-bubble cavitation. Nature 401, 772–775 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44536

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