Zhong Ding
S. M. Gracewski
Dept. of Mech. Eng., Univ. of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
An understanding of cavitation phenomena including the response of a gas cavity in liquid to a time-dependent pressure wave is important in a large range of situations. In the paper, the response of a gas cavity in water to shock waves is analyzed using the arbitrary Lagrangian--Eulerian technique. An axisymmetric model is used in the numerical simulation of a gas cavity response to both weak shocks (p/p[sub 0](less than or equal to)300, with p[sub 0]=0.1 MPa) and strong shocks (p/p[sub 0] ranges from 5000 to 20 000). An artificial viscosity to capture the shock was developed. A simple, stable, and adaptive mesh generation technique was designed to generate finer meshes at higher pressure gradients. The shock propagation, rarefaction, and transmission were analyzed over the entire computational domain. When impacted by a weak shock, a gas cavity will collapse almost spherically creating a large pressure within the gas and the surrounding liquid due to the rapid compression of the gas. When impacted by a strong shock, a gas cavity will collapse with a jet penetrating the opposite side of the interface with a speed as high as 2000 m/s.