Stroboscopic Schlieren Study of Bubble Formation during Megasonic Agitation

Abstract

An important problem in megasonic cleaning is the nucleation process of bubbles, which act as the cleaning agents. A fundamental understanding of this nucleation process will help to optimize the cleaning parameters for future applications to achieve damage free cleaning. In this work, we use quantitative stroboscopic Schlieren imaging to study the interaction of nucleating bubbles with a travelling acoustic wave. The advantage of this method is that it is non-interfering, meaning that it does not disturb the bubble nucleation. It is revealed that nucleation mechanism is a 2 step process, where a regime of slow bubble growth due to rectified diffusion is subsequently followed by a transient cavitation cycle, where bubbles grow explosively. The latter is accompanied by broadband acoustic emission and enhanced thermal dissipation, leading to the occurrence of thermal convection visible in the Schlieren images.