To be a source of expertise and knowledge for the application of ultrasound in different fields and in prototyping ultrasonic equipment for academia and industry.
To take sonochemistry and ultrasonic processing to pilot and industrial scales.
This will be achieved by converting the experience and knowledge of the applications of ultrasound in chemistry and adjacent fields accumulated by the directors inti industry standard, via prototyping of new ultrasonic equipment.
Tim Mason studied chemistry at Southampton University between 1964-1970 (BSc and PhD) and subsequently was awarded a NATO Fellowship which took him to Amherst College USA to further his studies in Physical Organic Chemistry. He moved to Coventry University (at that time a Polytechnic) in 1975 and together with (the late) Phil Lorimer helped pioneer the development of sonochemistry from obscurity to international recognition. He organised the first ever international symposium on Sonochemistry as part of an RSC Meeting at Warwick University in 1986, co-authored the first ever book devoted to sonochemistry in 1989 “Sonochemistry, Theory, Applications and Uses of Ultrasound in Chemistry” and has subsequently published 14 books, 35 chapters in texts and over 300 papers on sonochemistry, his overall h-index is 56 and Research Gate score is 44.14.
Dr. Mircea Vinatoru (Coventry University) has extensive experience in application of ultrasound for technological purposes. He has designed and supervised the manufacture of the first successful industrial scale ultrasonic batch reactor (1000 L volume, 4.5 kW ultrasonic power) dedicated to natural products extraction. He developed the first continuous sonochemical process for the transesterification of vegetable oil to produce biodiesel with Japanese, USA and EU patents on this technology. In 2005 was employed in Canada, Food Technology Centre, PEI, to setup a pilot facility for natural products extraction using ultrasound. In 2006, in Texas, he set up a research laboratory for a private company in order to perform research work for renewable fuels. After that he was employed at Coventry University as a senior research fellow to work for an European project – SONO – aimed at embedding metal oxides nanoparticles into fabrics to make it antimicrobial.
