Industrial sonochemistry: potential and practicality

It has been recognized for many years that power ultrasound has great potential for a wide variety of processes in chemical and allied industries. For laboratory scale reactions it has been shown that ultrasound can improve yields, speed up chemical and physico-chemical processes or change reaction pathways. Despite these very promising effects there are very few reported industrial scale uses of sonochemistry. At this state in the development of the subject it would seem that the main hindrance to the adoption of sonochemistry by industry is a lack of knowledge of the large scale equipment that is currently available and the way in which it operates. In this paper various types of large scale sonochemical reactor are reviewed.