Sonochemistry Hot-Spot: Cavitation Bubble Collapse

Ultrasound passing through a liquid can nucleate microscopic gas bubbles that oscillate with the sound field and then collapse with extraordinary violence — a phenomenon called acoustic cavitation. This simulator numerically integrates the Rayleigh–Plesset equation for a single spherical bubble driven by a sinusoidal acoustic pressure, rendering the bubble wall in real 3D as it swells during rarefaction and implodes during compression. Because the collapse compresses the trapped gas far faster than heat can diffuse away, the process is nearly adiabatic and the interior briefly reaches thousands of kelvin — the "hot spot" that pyrolyzes water vapor into reactive •OH and •H radicals, the actual chemical driver behind sonochemistry and sonolysis. Tune the acoustic pressure amplitude, drive frequency, ambient bubble radius and gas polytropic index to see how each changes the violence of collapse, the peak hot-spot temperature, and the radical output.