Fission of Collapsing Cavitation Bubbles

Abstract

High-speed observations (for example, Lauterborn and Bolle 1975, Tomita and Shima 1990, Frost and Sturtevant 1986) clearly show that though a collapsing cavitation bubble approaches its minimum size as a coherent single volume, it usually reappears in the first rebounding frame as a cloud of much smaller bubbles or as a highly distorted single volume (see, for example, figure 2). This paper explores two mechanisms that may be responsible for that bubble fission process, one invoking a Rayleigh-Taylor stability analysis and the other utilizing the so-called microjet mechanism. Both approaches are shown to lead to qualitatively similar values for the number of fission fragments and the paper investigates the flow parameters that effect that number. Finally, we explore the effective damping of the Rayleigh-Plesset single bubble calculation which that fission process implies and show that it is consistent with the number of collapses and rebounds which are observed to occur in experiments.

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