Many applications such as ultrasonic cleaning or sonochemistry use the ability of bubbles to oscillate and drive liquid flow. But bubbles have also received attention in porous media, where drying may cause cavitation, a phenomenon occurring in plant tissues. Here we explore the dynamics of cavitation bubbles when the liquid is fully entrapped in an elastic solid, using light scattering, laser strobe photography and high speed camera recordings. Our experiments show unexpectedly fast bubble oscillations in volume. They depend on the confinement size and elasticity, which we explain with a simple model where liquid compressibility is a key parameter. We also observe rich non-spherical dynamics, with ejection away from the walls and bubble fragmentation, which reveal extreme fluid motion at short timescales.

The collapse of a cavitation bubble near a rigid boundary induces a high-speed transient jet accelerating liquid onto the boundary. The shear flow produced by this event has many applications, examples are surface cleaning, cell membrane poration, and enhanced cooling. Yet the magnitude and spatio-temporal distribution of the wall shear stress are not well understood, neither experimentally nor by simulations. Here we solve the flow in the boundary layer using an axisymmetric compressible Volume of Fluid (VOF) solver from the OpenFOAM framework and discuss the resulting wall shear stress generated for a non-dimensional distance, γ = 1.0 (γ = h/R max , where h is the distance of the initial bubble centre to the boundary, R max the maximum spherical equivalent radius of the bubble). The calculation of the wall shear stress is found reliable once the flow region with constant shear rate in the boundary layer is determined. Very high wall shear stresses of 100 kPa are found during the early spreading of the jet followed by complex flows composed of annular stagnation rings and secondary vortices. Although the simulated bubble dynamics agrees very well with experiments we obtain only qualitative agreement with experiments due to inherent experimental challenges.

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We report on an experimental study of cavitation bubble dynamics within sub-millimetre-sized narrow gaps. The gap height is varied, while the position of the cavitation event is fixed with respect to the lower gap wall. Four different sizes of laser-induced cavitation bubbles are studied using high-speed photography of up to 430,000 frames per second. We find a strong influence of the gap height, H, on the bubble dynamics, in particular on the collapse scenario. Also, similar bubble dynamics was found for the same non-dimensional gap height η = H/Rx, where Rx is the maximum radius in the horizontal direction. Three scenarios are observed: neutral collapse at the gap centre, collapse onto the lower wall and collapse onto the upper wall. For intermediate gap height the bubble obtains a conical shape 1.4 < η < 7.0. For large distances, η > 7.0, the bubble no longer feels the presence of the upper wall and collapses hemispherically. The collapse time increases with respect to the expansion time for decreasing values of η. Due to the small scales involved, the final stage of the bubble collapse could not be resolved temporally and numerical simulations were performed to elucidate the details of the flow. The simulations demonstrate high-speed jetting towards the upper and lower walls and complex bubble splitting for neutral collapses.

Liquid jetting and fragmentation are important in many industrial and medical applications. Here, we study the jetting from the surface of single liquid droplets undergoing internal volume oscillations. This is accomplished by an explosively expanding and collapsing vapour bubble within the droplet. We observe jets emerging from the droplet surface, which pinch off into finer secondary droplets. The jetting is excited by the spherical Rayleigh–Taylor instability where the radial acceleration is due to the oscillation of an internal bubble. We study this jetting and the effect of fluid viscosity experimentally and numerically. Experiments are carried out by levitating the droplet in an acoustic trap and generating a laser-induced cavitation bubble near the centre of the droplet. On the simulation side, the volume of fluid method (OpenFOAM) solves the compressible Navier–Stokes equations while accounting for surface tension and viscosity. Both two-dimensional (2-D) axisymmetric and 3-D simulations are performed and show good agreement with each other and the experimental observation. While the axisymmetric simulation reveals how the bubble dynamics results destabilizes the interface, only the 3-D simulation computes the geometrically correct slender jets. Overall, experiments and simulations show good agreement for the bubble dynamics, the onset of disturbances and the rapid ejection of filaments after bubble collapse. Additionally, an analytic model for the droplet surface perturbation growth is developed based on the spherical Rayleigh–Taylor instability analysis, which allows us to evaluate the surface stability over a large parameter space. The analytic model predicts correctly the onset of jetting as a function of Reynolds number and normalized internal bubble energy.