Nonlinear oscillations of gas bubbles submerged in water: implications for plasma breakdown

Abstract

Gas bubbles submerged in a dielectric liquid and driven by an electric field can undergo dramatic changes in both shape and volume. In certain cases, this deformation can enhance the distribution of the applied field inside the bubble as well as decrease the internal gas pressure. Both effects will tend to facilitate plasma formation in the gas volume. A practical realization of these two effects could have a broad impact on the viability of liquid plasma technologies, which tend to suffer from high voltage requirements. In this experiment, bubbles of diameter 0.4–0.7 mm are suspended in the node of a 26.4 kHz underwater acoustic standing wave and excited into nonlinear shape oscillations using ac electric fields with amplitudes of 5–15 kV cm−1. Oscillations of the deformed bubble are photographed with a high-speed camera operating at 5130 frames s−1 and the resulting images are decomposed into their axisymmetric spherical harmonic modes, , using an edge detection algorithm. Overall, the bubble motion is dominated by the first three even modes l = 0, 2 and 4. Electrostatic simulations of the deformed bubble's internal electric field indicate that the applied field is enhanced by as much as a factor of 2.3 above the nominal applied field. Further simulation of both the pure l = 2 and l = 4 modes predicts that with additional deformation, the field enhancement factors could reach as much as 10–50.