Practical Sonochemistry

Tim Mason is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Sonochemistry Centre at the University of Coventry, UK. He graduated from Southampton University, UK in 1967 with a BSc in Chemistry and continued his career in the research field of physical organic chemistry with a PhD from the same university and two years as a post-doc at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA. He began research into sonochemistry at Coventry University with his first paper on the subject published in 1980. He became the first president of the European Society of Sonochemistry when it was formed in 1991 until 2014 and became editor of Ultrasonics Sonochemistry from its first issue in 1994 until he retired as Editor in Chief in 2017. He has authored and edited 11 textbooks and the six-volume series "Advances in Sonochemistry. Since his retirement and appointment as emeritus professor at Coventry University, he has continued his research interests in a broad range of topics which include fundamental aspects of sonochemistry, reactor design and scale-up, environmental protection, food processing, ultrasonically assisted extraction (UAE), materials processing and therapeutic ultrasound. Currently his main research collaboration is with co-author Mircea Vinatoru through the ULTRA-MINT programme.Mircea Vinatoru is a principal investigator at Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania where he directed a European/Romanian research programme involving the use of hybrid ultrasound and microwave technologies in a range of chemical reactions (ULTRA-MINT). He has over 50 years of experience in organic chemistry research of which the last 32 were dedicated to sonochemistry. During his career in sonochemistry he studied electron transfer processes facilitated by ultrasound as part of his PhD thesis. He was a pioneer in two major fields - the ultrasonically assisted synthesis of biodiesel fuel (UASB) and ultrasonically assisted extraction (UAE) of bioactive compounds from medicinal and aromatic herbs, in both of which he holds patents. In the medical field he has published papers on the use of ultrasound to produce self-sterilizing fabrics and the synthesis of targeted drug delivery systems. Other contributions have been on the applications of ultrasound in environmental protection and its use in enzyme activation. He is a chemical engineer and has designed and built the first industrial reactor for ultrasonically assisted extraction of medicinal herbs and pilot scale reactors for biodiesel synthesis. He holds many research positions in public research institutes and universities in Romania and abroad. He has also assembled a sonochemistry research facility in Texas, USA where new technologies for biodiesel synthesis assisted by ultrasound were developed. He has more than 80 publications which have received over 6000 citations.