Shock-Induced Bubble Collapse
Shock-wave driven bubble collapse, which sometimes produces high-speed jets, occurs in a wide range of applications involving transient pressure waves and liquid-gas media. These include, cavitating flows and therapeutic shock wave lithotripsy.
Although thoroughly studied through numerical simulations, the small spatial and temporal scales associated with such phenomena make their experimental observation particularly challenging. Here, shock-induced collapses of gas bubbles are temporally resolved through ultra-high-speed imaging, which offers unprecedented details on the jetting dynamics. Such visualizations can be directly compared with simple analytical expressions which describe bubble dynamics under impulse loadings. These results help determine the shock driving conditions required for microbubbles to form jets.