Numerical simulation of the nonlinear ultrasonic pressure wave propagation in a cavitating bubbly liquid inside a sonochemical reactor

•Analysis of acoustic wave propagation in bubbly liquid in a sonoreactor was carried out.•Linear and nonlinear propagation models were compared.•Nonlinear models produce more realistic results of the intensity and location of cavitation zones.•The nonlinear model showed to be more suitable for the design of sonoreactors. We investigate the acoustic wave propagation in bubbly liquid inside a pilot sonochemical reactor which aims to produce antibacterial medical textile fabrics by coating the textile with ZnO or CuO nanoparticles. Computational models on acoustic propagation are developed in order to aid the design procedures. The acoustic pressure wave propagation in the sonoreactor is simulated by solving the Helmholtz equation using a meshless numerical method. The paper implements both the state-of-the-art linear model and a nonlinear wave propagation model recently introduced by Louisnard (2012), and presents a novel iterative solution procedure for the nonlinear propagation model which can be implemented using any numerical method and/or programming tool. Comparative results regarding both the linear and the nonlinear wave propagation are shown. Effects of bubble size distribution and bubble volume fraction on the acoustic wave propagation are discussed in detail. The simulations demonstrate that the nonlinear model successfully captures the realistic spatial distribution of the cavitation zones and the associated acoustic pressure amplitudes.