Computational study of state equation effect on single acoustic cavitation bubble’s phenomenon

Abstract

Many models have been established to study the evolution of the bubble dynamics and chemical kinetics within a single acoustic cavitation bubble during its oscillation. The content of the bubble is a gas medium that generates the evolution of a chemical mechanism governed by the internal bubble conditions. These gases are described by a state equation, linking the pressure to the volume, temperature and species amounts, and influencing simultaneously the dynamical, the thermal and the mass variation in the cavitation bubble. The choice of the state equation to apply has then a non-neglected effect on the obtained results. In this paper, a comparative study was conducted through two numerical models based on the same assumptions and the same scheme of chemical reactions, except that the first one uses the ideal gas equation to describe the state of the species, while the second one uses the Van der Waals equation. It was found that though the dynamic of the bubble is not widely affected, the pressure and temperature range are significantly increased when passing from an ideal gas model to a real one. The amounts of chemical products are consequently raised to approximately the double. This observation was more significant for temperature and pressure at low frequency and high acoustic amplitude, while it is noticed that passing from ideal gas based approach to the Van der Waals one increases the free radicals amount mainly under high frequencies. When taking the results of the second model as reference, the relative difference between both results reaches about 60% for maximum attained temperature and 100% for both pressure and free radicals production.