Quantification of Methanol-Water Mixture Ultrasonic Cavitation Event

Ultrasonic cavitation is a phenomena where the media is subjected to rapid, alternating high pressure, ultrasonic excitation or pulsed heating laser. Voids contain small micro bubbles are created when the differences between amplitude pressure of ultrasonic waves and the hydrostatic pressure in the liquid are large enough to exceed the local tensile strength of the liquid medium. This technique has been applied in various fields including cleaning, plant reactor, marine, medical, and disk drive component industries.
One of the cavitation measurements is by using aluminum foil. However, this technique only provides qualitative measurement. There is a method proposed regarding this issue. By using image-processing in MATLAB, an algorithm is built to quantify the cavitation activities. It is also known that the ultrasonic cavitations are strongly influenced by the medium. The objective of this project is to investigate how the image processing technique performs under different media for cavitations event. This medium is referred to an aqueous solution (i.e., water, or any aqueous mixture) that will be used where the cavitations take place. In this project, the mixture of methanol and water is used as the medium.
Based on the measurement provided, the cavitation intensity is studied according to the differences of ultrasonic media properties. The mixture used is methanol-water with different compositions of each component in the mixture. The properties that have been studied are density and viscosity of the ultrasonic media. High composition of methanol in mixture leads to less cavitation intensity.