Sonomechanics Blog

In March of this year, Industrial Sonomechanics (ISM) hosted a webinar, entitled "Water-Compatible Nanoemulsions: The Battle of Formulations", presented by ISM's President and Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Alexey Peshkovsky. The video recording of this event has been posted on our YouTube channel.

The webinar generated over 100 questions, some of which were addressed by Alexey during the event. The answers to the remaining questions are provided below. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below. 

Industrial Sonomechanics (ISM) is pleased to announce the recent publication of a book entitled "Ultrasound: Advances in Food Processing and Preservation," edited by Dr. Daniela Bermudez-Aguirre (Academic Press, 2017). The book provides an extensive overview of the potential of ultrasound technology to drive innovation in the field of food processing and preservation, and features a chapter by ISM's co-founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Alexey Peshkovsky. This chapter, entitled "From Research to Production: Overcoming Scale-Up Limitations of Ultrasonic Processing," explains how ultrasonic processing can be directly scaled up from laboratory to production environments while maintaining reproducible, high-quality results.

One of the main challenges in the food & beverage industry is the inactivation of microorganisms (pasteurization). Thermal treatment of such products as milk and fruit-based beverages (generally, at over 70 °C)  is currently the most commonly applied pasteurization method. Unfortunately, this approach causes significant deterioration of many of these products' attributes, such as flavor, color and nutritional quality. Alternative, non-thermal pasteurization methods that can not only ensure the microbial safety of the products, but also preserve their quality are, therefore, of great interest to this industry.

Liquids exposed to high-intensity ultrasound can undergo acoustic cavitation. This phenomenon can typically be seen as a cloud of bubbles forming in the vicinity of the ultrasonic source (e.g., ultrasonic horn) and heard as an intense hissing noise. Cavitation is the formation of low-pressure voids (a.k.a., vacuum bubbles or cavities) in the liquid, which grow, briefly oscillate and then asymmetrically implode with great intensity.

Are you introducing ultrasound as a new technological solution for your liquid processing application? If so, some terms used in the ultrasonic industry may be unfamiliar. With this in mind, we are launching a series of blog posts that will cover the most common ultrasonic equipment and processing-related terminology.

This first post will focus on the terms used to describe the main components of an Industrial Sonomechanics (ISM) ultrasonic liquid processor and show you how these components work together.