Sonochemistry
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What is Sonochemistry?Chemistry is the interaction of energy and matter. Yet there are surprisingly few ways of putting energy into molecules to drive reactions. One of the newest, ultrasound, uses the principles of acoustic cavitation in the formation, growth, and violent collapse of bubbles in a liquid called ''single bubble sonoluminescence'' Life as a chemist might not be as exciting as Keanu Reeves, suggested in the 1996 movie Chain Reaction. In that 20th Century Fox thriller, a Nobel laureate and his grad student discover a way of using sonochemistry to catalytically produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen from plain water- and get caught in a chain reaction of murder and high-tech espionage. Unlike researchers in the movie, this real-life breed of chemists is constrained by realities such as the laws of thermodynamics. Even so, they are driving some very exotic reactions under extreme conditions. There are plenty of exciting practical applications althought not quite on a scale of the new source of clean, limitless enery described in Chain Reaction
This means that chemical reactions that take place under more conventional conditions are accelerated, or even yield totally different products. The reason for this can be due to either physical or chemical effects of cavitation.
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