Morphological Analysis of a Collapsing Cavitation Bubble near a Solid Wall with Complex Geometry

Featured Application Collapsing cavitation bubbles can be used in material surface cleaning, the medical field, and so on. By adjusting the micro-jet intensity of the collapsing bubbles, the cavitation phenomenon can be employed to clean irregular material surfaces, such as sections, cracks, and vegetable leaves. In the medical field, cavitation bubbles can be used as microbubble contrast agents for ultrasound diagnostic imaging or vehicles for drug or gene delivery. The growth and violent collapse of cavitation bubbles can also be employed in sterilization or killing viruses such as COVID-19. The interaction mechanism between the cavitation bubble and a solid wall is a basic problem in bubble collapse prevention and application. In particular, when bubble collapse occurs near solid walls with arbitrarily complex geometries, it is difficult to efficiently establish a model and quantitatively explore the interaction mechanism between bubbles and solid walls. Based on the advantages of the lattice Boltzmann method, a model for cavitation bubble collapse close to a solid wall was established using the pseudopotential multi-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model. Solid walls with arbitrarily complex geometries were introduced in the computational domain, and the fractal dimension was used to quantify the complexity of the solid wall. Furthermore, owing to the lack of periodicity, symmetry, spatial uniformity and obvious correlation in this process, the Minkowski functionals-based morphological analysis method was introduced to quantitatively describe the temporal evolution of collapsing bubble profiles and acquire effective information from the process. The interaction mechanism between the bubble and solid wall was investigated using evolutions of physical fields. In addition, the influences of the solid walls' surface conditions and the position parameter on collapsing bubbles were discussed. These achievements provide an efficient tool for quantifying the morphological changes of the collapsing bubble.

Automated summary

Collapsing cavitation bubbles have various applications in material surface cleaning, medical imaging, and sterilization. This study established a model for cavitation bubble collapse near a complex solid wall using the lattice Boltzmann method. The morphological changes of the collapsing bubble were quantitatively analyzed using the Minkowski functionals-based morphological analysis method. The interaction mechanism between the bubble and solid wall was investigated, and the influences of solid wall conditions and position parameters on collapsing bubbles were discussed.