A liquid-mercury target system for the MW-scale target is being developed in the world. The pitting damage induced by pressure wave propagation gets to be one of critical issues to estimate the life of the target structure with mercury and to evaluate its structural integrity. The off-line test on the pitting damage at high cycles over 10 millions was carried out using a novel device, the MIMTM which drives electromagnetically to impose pulse pressure into the mercury. It was found from the pitting damage data obtained by the MIMTM and comparison with classical vibratory hone tests that the pitting damage can be characterized in two steps, an incubation period that can extend to 10 6 cycles in 20% cold worked 316SS and 10 7 cycles in surface hardening treated one and steady state erosion where mass loss scales with the number of cycles to approximately the 1.27 power for mercury. The length of the incubation period is primarily a function of the material and the intensity of the pressure. This observation provides a simple model for estimating lifetime for different materials and beam power.

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The dynamic behavior of cavitation and gas bubbles under negative pressure has been studied numerically to evaluate the effect of gas bubble injection into a liquid on the suppression of cavitation inception. In our previous studies, it was demonstrated by direct observation that cavitation occurs in liquid mercury when mechanical impacts are imposed, and this will cause cavitation damage in spallation neutron sources, in which liquid mercury is bombarded by a high-power proton beam. In the present paper, we describe numerical investigations of the dynamics of cavitation bubbles in liquid mercury using a multibubble model that takes into account the interaction of a cavitation bubble with preexisting gas bubbles through bubble-radiated pressure waves. The numerical results suggest that, if the mercury includes gas bubbles whose equilibrium radius is much larger than that of the cavitation bubble, the explosive expansion of the cavitation bubble (i.e., cavitation inception) is suppressed by the positive-pressure wave radiated by the injected bubbles, which decreases the magnitude of the negative pressure in the mercury.