Pressure fluctuations and their effect on cavitation inception within water jets

Abstract

Instantaneous and phase averaged pressure distributions in the near field of a jet, and their effects on the conditions for the onset of cavitation are studied in detail. The measurements are performed by using microscopic bubbles as pressure sensors, and holography as a means of detecting them. Experiments are performed at Red exceeding 4 × 105, with and without acoustic excitation. The results show that the highest negative pressure peaks (–0.97) and the resulting cavitation inception occur because of vortex pairing. Prior to pairing the negative peaks are between –0.8 and –0.9. Weak acoustic excitation changes the entire flow structure and the spatial distributions of bubbles, but has little effect on the onset of cavitation. Downstream of the potential core the highest pressure peaks (∼ –0.6) are considerably smaller, in agreement with the occurrence of cavitation there. It is also shown that although the r.m.s. values of pressure fluctuations do not vary with the jet speed, the probability distribution changes significantly, causing a reduction in the inception index with increasing velocity. The probability of cavitation inception is estimated from the distributions of bubbles and pressure peaks. It is shown that the actual, non-uniform bubble distribution increases the probability of inception owning to migration of the bubbles to the low pressure regions.