Experimental investigations of cavitation-bubble collapse in the neighbourhood of a solid boundary

Cavitation bubbles were produced by focusing giant pulses of a Q -switched ruby laser into distilled water. The dynamics of the bubbles in the neighbourhood of a solid boundary were studied by means of high-speed photography using a rotating-mirror camera with framing rates of up to 300000 frame/s. Bubble motion was evaluated from the frames with the aid of a digital computer using a graphical input device. Smoothed distance-time curves of different portions of the bubble wall were obtained also, allowing a reliable calculation of bubble-wall velocities (except at the actual instant of collapse). One of the numerical examples of the collapse of a spherical bubble near a plane solid boundary obtained by Plesset & Chapman could be realized experimentally. A comparison of the bubble shapes shows good agreement.