Crystallization abounds in nature and industrial practice. A plethora of indispensable products ranging from agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals to battery materials are produced in crystalline form in industrial practice. Yet, our control over the crystallization process across scales, from molecular to macroscopic, is far from complete. This bottleneck not only hinders our ability to engineer the properties of crystalline products essential for maintaining our quality of life but also hampers progress toward a sustainable circular economy in resource recovery. In recent years, approaches leveraging light fields have emerged as promising alternatives to manipulate crystallization. In this presentation, recent advances in nonphotochemical laser-induced nucleation will be discussed. Particularly, we recently demonstrated that a cavitation bubble initiated by a Nd:YAG laser pulse below breakdown threshold induces crystallization from supersaturated aqueous solutions with supersaturation and laser-energy-dependent nucleation kinetics[1]. Combining high-speed video microscopy and simulations, we argue that a competition between the dissipation of absorbed laser energy as latent and sensible heat dictates the solvent evaporation rate and creates a momentary supersaturation peak at the vapor-liquid interface. The number and morphology of crystals correlate to the characteristics of the simulated supersaturation peak. Inspired by these results, we further explore effect of thermocaviation bubble-bubble interactions to further our control over nucleation from solution.

Contributors

N. Nagalingam(1) , V. Korede(1) ,R. Hartkamp(1) , J. T. Padding(1) , H.B.Eral(1)

(1)TU Delft, Delft, The Netherlands

References

[1] N. Nagalingam et. al. Physical Review Letters 2023 131 (12), 124001, N. Nagalingam et. al. 2024 Scientific Reports 14 (1), 21226