Numerical study of the behavior of a near-wall bubble under the influence of an acoustic wave

Abstract

Acoustic cavitation has been applied to many ultrasonic fields, but its characteristics are not fully understood, especially near the wall. To analyze the dynamics of a near-wall acoustic bubble, an acoustic pressure wave boundary condition is developed in the OpenFOAM platform. We first conducted the model’s validation with an experiment to prove its accuracy. The bubble’s radius increases when the bubble is excited by the lower-pressure wave, and it decreases under the higher-pressure wave. When the bubble collapses, its pressure and temperature will reach the maximum value. In accordance with the non-dimensional distance, the dynamics of the acoustic-driven bubble are classified into three types, i.e., the liquid jet not touching the nearby wall, the liquid jet touching the wall, and no obvious liquid jet. The maximum value of pressure and temperature increases with the dimensionless distance decreasing if the dimensionless distance is small. However, there is no variation of these peak values with dimensionless distance if the dimensionless distance is large.