Hi.

Q1: Does anyone know what the sizes of cavitation bubbles are ?

Q2: Does cavitation only occur when the pressure is below the vapor pressure, or does it initiate much sooner? If it occurs sooner, when does it occur? Any thumb rules, links or articles I should know of ?

Cheers

A1: There is no unique cavitation bubble size. They appear as critical bubbles (~1e-6m) and grow until under-saturation disappears.

A2: Cavitation can occur because of pressure decrease below the saturation pressure of the same substance (e.g. vapor and liquid are H2O) or below the saturation pressure of dissolved gases (e.g. in coca-cola bubbles are CO2 in mostly liquid H2O).

Angen

Hi

Cavitation and bubble dynamics by Brennen 1995 is available for reference online.

That should resolve all your questions. Further read, Cavitation by Knapp, 1970. Should be available in all libraries.

If you still have questions, Lemme knw. I have been workin with cav simulations.

CFDtoy

Hi.

I can see that the litterature tries to find a critical value for the cavitation number. And it seems to me that there is no universal value (like one can use Re>2300 is turbulent in tubes and Re>5e5 on surfaces). The critical number in the texts I have seen ranges from below 1 to above 100. I cannot find any grouping. Do you know of any?

Christian

Hello Christian, Cavitation number is defined as sigma=Pv-Pinf/(0.5*rho*v*v)

where Pv = vap pressure. So, essentially the cav number of the system with P< Pv is dependent on v which defines the reynolds number. So yeah, cav number could be anything. A No flow/creeping flow region with less pressure < Pvap can also result in cavitation with a low Reynolds number !

CFDtoy

Is it safe to say that cavitation will _never_ occur when p_stat > p_vapor ?

No, it is not. In case of multi-component liquids (e.g. H2O and CO2) it should be replaced with P_b < P, where P-b is a bubble pressure and P is an actual local pressure in liquid. In general, P_b = P_sat only in case of single component liquids. So, in single component liquid the condition for not having cavitation would be P_sat < P. If there are external fields (e.g electric) that can still be more complicated.

Angen