Technical note: measurement of collapse cavitation in ultrasound fields

This note describes a method for the measurement of hydroxyl free radical concentration due to collapse acoustic cavitation in medical ultrasound fields using aqueous terephthalic acid (TA) solution. An enclosed cylindrical chamber with acoustically transparent membranes at either end was used. Control of cavitation activity was achieved by seeding the solution with polystyrene microspheres to provide cavitation centres. Insonation experiments using unseeded TA previously exposed to air gave very variable results, sometimes detecting cavitation activity and at other times detecting nothing, under the same exposure conditions. Introduction of polystyrene microsphere seeds into the TA enabled it to detect reproducibly levels of cavitation activity at least one order of magnitude higher than in unseeded solutions. An experiment using the seeded TA in a standing wave ultrasound field, set up using a brass reflecting plate, demonstrated that the presence of a standing wave inhibited the measured cavitation yield.