Question

What effect does ultrasound energy has on interfacial energy ?? Does the interfacial energy increase or decrease with application of Ultrasound on crystalisation process??

Answer 1

Surface enery is quantification of all intermolecular forces acting on the surafce of a solid.

Crystallisation mainly consists of two stages i.e. Nucleation and crystal growth. Nucleation involves formation of nuclei resulting in formation of crystals. Crystal growth is the increase in the particle size leading to a crystal state.

Sonocrystallisation is one of the crystallisation techniques in which ultrasound energy is used to obtain crystals of desired size. Application of ultrasound energy during the nucleation stage result in the formation of large number of crystals of smaller size there by increasing the surface energy.