We report on cavitation in confined microscopic environments which are commonly called microfluidic or lab-on-a-chip systems. The cavitation bubble is created by focusing a pulsed laser into these structures filled with a light-absorbing liquid. At the center of a 20 microm thick and 1 mm wide channel, pancake-shaped bubbles expand and collapse radially. The bubble dynamics compares with a two-...

Heterogeneous bubble nucleation at surfaces has been notorious because of its irreproducibility. Here controlled multibubble surface cavitation is achieved by using a hydrophobic surface patterned with microcavities. The expansion of the nuclei in the microcavities is triggered by a fast lowering of the liquid pressure. The procedure allows us to control and fix the bubble distance within the b...

The collapse of laser-induced cavitation bubbles creates acoustic transients within the surrounding medium and also pressure impulses to the ablation target and light-delivery fiber during microsecond laser ablation. The impulses are investigated here with time-resolved flash photography, and they are found to occur whether or not the light-delivery fiber is in contact with the target. We demon...

Striking the top of a liquid-filled bottle can shatter the bottom. An intuitive interpretation of this event might label an impulsive force as the culprit in this fracturing phenomenon. However, high-speed photography reveals the formation and collapse of tiny bubbles near the bottom before fracture. This observation indicates that the damaging phenomenon of cavitation is at fault. Cavitation i...

Laser-induced breakdown of an optically trapped nanoparticle is a unique system for studying cavitation dynamics. It offers additional degrees of freedom, namely the nanoparticle material, its size, and the relative position between the laser focus and the center of the optically trapped nanoparticle. We quantify the spatial and temporal dynamics of the cavitation and secondary bubbles created ...

This paper summarizes the numerical analysis of a liquid-liquid ejector pump with focus on the accuracy of the employed cavitation model and in view of its potential application as a dualor multi-liquid mixing and injection system. While the use of gas-phase or gas/liquid-phase ejection systems has found wide application in gas/hybrid burners and scrubbers for air pollution control; the use of ...

Cavitation bubbles occur in fluids subjected to rapid changes in pressure. We use billion-atom reactive molecular dynamics simulations on a 163,840-processor BlueGene/P supercomputer to investigate damage caused by shock-induced collapse of nanobubbles in water near an amorphous silica surface. Collapse of an empty bubble generates a high-speed nanojet, which causes pitting on the silica surfac...

Mantis shrimp are renowned for their unusual method of breaking shells with brief, powerful strikes of their raptorial appendages. Due to the extreme speeds of these strikes underwater, cavitation occurs between their appendages and hard-shelled prey. Here we examine the magnitude and relative contribution of the impact and cavitation forces generated by the peacock mantis shrimp Odontodactylus...