Visualization of Disruptive Bubble Behavior in Ultrasonic Fields

The bubble oscillations play an important role in ultrasonic cleaning processes. In the ultrasonic cleaning of semiconductor wafers, the cleaning process often damages micro/nano scale patterns while removing contaminant particles. However, the understanding of how patterns in semiconductor wafers are damaged during ultrasonic cleaning is far from complete yet. Here, we report the observations of the motion of bubbles that induce solid wall damage under 26 kHz continuous ultrasonic waves. We classified the motions into the four types, i.e. volume motion, shape motion, splitting or jetting motion and chaotic motion. Our experimental results show that bubble oscillations get unstable and nonlinear as the ultrasonic amplitude increases, which may exert a large stress on a solid surface raising the possibility of damaging microstructures.