Investigation of Acoustic Cavitation in Aqueous Surfactant Solutions for Cleaning Applications

Surfactants are commonly used as additives in cleaning formulations during acoustic cleaning of semiconductor surfaces. Since surfactants are surface active, they can affect cavitation characteristics and, therefore, influence cleaning efficiency and damage to the surface. In this work, stable and transient cavitation pressures were characterized in Triton® X-100 containing aqueous solutions subjected to single frequency and dual-frequency sound fields using acoustic emission measurements. The hydrophone based technique allowed quantitative measurements of the absolute pressure values from stable and transient cavitation fields. The ratio of stable cavitation pressure to transient cavitation pressure under different conditions indicated that surfactants can play an important role in reducing feature damage while maintaining particle removal efficiency. Damage studies conducted on aluminum coated glass samples further confirmed these results.