Abstract Cavitation is a phase change phenomenon that involves the formation, growth, and collapse of vapor bubbles in a liquid, typically due to local pressure changes. Accurately modeling cavitation is essential for understanding and predicting its impacts across diverse applications, from biomedical devices to industrial equipment. This study introduces a novel hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian framework to model cavitation inception and growth from microscopic nuclei. Existing models often struggle to bridge the gap between the microscopic inception of cavitation from nuclei and its macroscopic propagation. This limitation restricts their ability to capture the detailed dynamics of microscopic bubbles, as well as the macroscopic cavitation process. Our proposed approach addresses this by treating nuclei as discrete Lagrangian entities, allowing for the independent tracking of each nucleus as an initial cavitation site. These Lagrangian bubbles evolve based on surrounding pressure changes, until reaching a critical size, at which they transform to a Eulerian representation, where a homogeneous mixture model combined with a Finite Mass Transfer model governs their behavior in the continuum phase. This dual-framework approach preserves the fine-scale details of individual bubbles in the Lagrangian framework while providing a scalable solution in the Eulerian framework, where bubbles can be resolved using a continuum-based solver. A transition model handles the transition between the frameworks based on the size of the bubble relative to the underlying grid. Validation results for both the individual frameworks and the unified framework are presented, demonstrating the suitability of the model to explore cavitation inception in realistic geometries.
Lavari et al. (Sun,) studied this question.