From Research to Production: Overcoming Scale-Up Limitations of Ultrasonic Processing

Abstract High-amplitude ultrasonic processing has evolved into a potentially game-changing technology for many industrial applications, including food and beverage processing. Until recently, however, its main challenge has been bridging the gap between laboratory research and its industrial implementation. Because of technological limitations of conventional ultrasonic technology, scaling up has not been possible without significant reduction in ultrasonic amplitudes, diminishing the intensity of cavitation-generated shear forces and severely compromising the quality of processing. This limitation has now been overcome with barbell horn ultrasonic technology (BHUT), which permits constructing industrial-scale ultrasonic liquid processors that can operate at extremely high ultrasonic amplitudes. In this chapter, main principles of BHUT are described in detail. With this technology, laboratory-to-industrial productivity scale-up factors of over 50 are shown to be possible to achieve without any reduction in the final product quality, allowing high-amplitude ultrasonic processing to effectively compete with costly alternatives in many commercial application areas.