Pulsating bubbles near boundaries

Abstract

The highly nonlinear behaviour of vigorously pulsating non-spherical bubbles near rigid and compliant boundaries, free surfaces and fluid-fluid interfaces has a wide application, ranging from problems in hydraulic and naval engineering, turbopumps in rockets, seismic airguns in marine exploration, underwater explosions, surface cleaning, mixing processes at interfaces and sonochemistry through to a diversity of uses in therapeutic medicine and surgery including shockwave lithitropsy, cell ablation in cancers, sonoporation and drug delivery using contrastagent bubbles. In this chapter the generic features of the bubble dynamics are presented through an appreciation of the fundamental physics associated with the phenomenon, the latest analytical and computational developments together with the available knowledge provided by experimentation. The study for incompressible and weakly compressible models is presented with a view to providing a better understanding of cavitation phenomena such that improved engineering and industrial design may be an outcome.