Spontaneous cavitation in liquid n-butane at negative and positive pressures

Abstract

The method of pulsed liquid superheating on a wire heater in a tension wave has been used to investigate the kinetics of spontaneous boiling-up of liquid n-butane. Experiments were conducted in the pressure range from −6.8 to 2.55MPa. Stretchings in a liquid were created by the inversion of a compression pulse at the liquid–vapor interface. The values of limiting superheatings for n-butane have been determined, as well as the effective nucleation rates J = 1020−1022s−1m−3 and the value of the derivative of the nucleation rate with respect to the temperature GT=dlnJ/dT. A satisfactory agreement between classical nucleation theory and experiment in the derivative GT has been established, which is a weighty argument in favor of realization of the homogeneous nucleation mechanism in experiment, with a systematic understatement of superheatings (stretchings) achieved by experiment with respect to their theoretical values. It has been noted that this may be connected with the fact that classical nucleation theory does not take into account the size dependence of the surface tension of critical bubbles.