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In this work, the effects of ultrasonic treatment on in-situ ZrB2 particle-reinforced AA4032-based composites were studied. The composites were synthesized from Al–K2ZrF6–KBF4 system via an in-situ melt reaction. The phase composition, macrostructure characteristics, hardness and tensile properties of the composites were investigated. The results showed that the addition of in-situ submicron ZrB2 particles into the composites resulted in grain refinement, and the increased hardness and tensile properties. The ultrasonic treatment effectively enhanced the uniformity of in-situ ZrB2 distribution, which further enhanced the structure and mechanical properties of the composites. The mechanisms of the ultrasonic treatment in the improvement of in-situ particle distribution and mechanical properties of the composites were discussed.

Ultrasonic emulsification (USE) assisted by cavitation is an effective method to produce emulsion droplets. However, the role of gas bubbles in the USE process still remains unclear. Hence, in the present paper, high-speed camera observations of bubble evolution and emulsion droplets formation in oil and water were used to capture in real-time the emulsification process, while experiments with different gas concentrations were carried out to investigate the effect of gas bubbles on droplet size. The results show that at the interface of oil and water, gas bubbles with a radius larger than the resonance radius collapse and sink into the water phase, inducing (oil–water) blended liquid jets across bubbles to generate oil-in-water-in-oil (O/W/O) and water-in-oil (W/O) droplets in the oil phase and oil-in-water (O/W) droplets in the water phase, respectively. Gas bubbles with a radius smaller than the resonance radius at the interface always move towards the oil phase, accompanied with the generation of water droplets in the oil phase. In the oil phase, gas bubbles, which can attract bubbles nearby the interface, migrate to the interface of oil and water due to acoustic streaming, and generate numerous droplets. As for the gas bubbles in the water phase, those can break neighboring droplets into numerous finer ones during bubble oscillation. With the increase in gas content, more bubbles undergo chaotic oscillation, leading to smaller and more stable emulsion droplets, which explains the beneficial role of gas bubbles in USE. Violently oscillating microbubbles are, therefore, found to be the governing cavitation regime for emulsification process. These results provide new insights to the mechanisms of gas bubbles in oil–water emulsions, which may be useful towards the optimization of USE process in industry.

The application of ultrasound to casting processes is a subject of great interest: the resulting degassing, sonocrystallization, wetting, fragmentation, de-agglomeration and dispersion yield an improved cast material with fine grain structure. However, due to the lack of understanding of certain fundamentals involved in the process, the transfer and scale-up of this promising technology to industry has been hindered by difficulties in treating large volumes of liquid metal. Experimental results of ultrasonic processing of liquid aluminium with a 5-kW magnetostrictive transducer and a 20-mm niobium sonotrode producing 17-kHz ultrasonic waves are reported in this study. A high-temperature cavitometer sensor that is placed at different locations in the liquid melt, measured cavitation activity at various acoustic power levels and in different temperature ranges. The highest cavitation intensity in the liquid bulk is achieved below the surface of the sonotrode, at the lowest temperature, and when the applied power was 3.5 kW. Understanding these ultrasonication mechanisms in liquid metals will result in a major breakthrough for the optimization of ultrasound applications in metal industries. Keywords: Ultrasonic treatment, Aluminium, Cavitation bubbles, Frequency spectrum, Acoustic pressure