Pressure Generation from Micro-Bubble Collapse at Shock Wave Loading

Abstract

This paper reports the result of a primary experimental and analytical study used to explore a reliable technology that is potentially applicable to the inactivation of micro-creatures contained in ship ballast water. A shock wave generated by the micro-explosion of a 10mg silver azide pellet in a 10mm wide parallel test section was used to interact with a bubble cloud consisting of bubbles with average diameter 10µm produced by a swirling flow type micro-bubble generator. Observations were carried out with a high-speed camera, IMACON200, and the corresponding rebound pressures of the collapsing bubbles were measured with a fiber optic probe pressure transducer that provides high spatial and temporal resolutions. We found that micro-bubbles collapse in several hundred nanoseconds after the shock exposure and the resulting peak pressure pulses that repeatedly occurred exceeded well over 200MPa measured at the 20mm distance from the explosion center. These continued for well over 20µs. The experimental pressure responses were explained by solving the one-dimensional bubble Rayleigh-Plesset equation. Such high peak pressures could be used effectively for the inactivation of micro-creatures contained in ship ballast water.