View Single Post
Old March 5, 2000, 10:01 PM   #13
hksigwalther
Senior Member
 
Join Date: November 18, 1998
Location: NE OH, USA
Posts: 3,198
Ooooo...sticking your hand in the ultrasonic cleaner for a long time is not a good idea (in my opinion). UCs use cavitation to clean (please correct me if I'm wrong, jeffg). Basically, what happens is microscopic bubbles are produced by the ultrasound and then collapse very quickly. Usually, one side of the bubble collapses first and this produces a small jet of high speed fluid heading towards the uncollapsed side. If the bubble is near a solid object, that jet will fly into it. It will be enough to dislodge any dirt which is the cleaning action. If you have a very soft solid object, you could potentialy disintegrate it (by the water jet). I once threw a dead bug into an ultrasound and it tore it apart. This might not work on all UCs as they don't all work in the same frequency.

Now...seeing that humans are 'bags of mostly water', I'm sure that some fluids in the hand would cavitate against bone, tissue, etc. which are less solid than metal.

- Ron V.
hksigwalther is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.03349 seconds with 8 queries