In-situ Investigation of the Onset of Cavitation Damage from Single Bubbles on Technical Alloys

Abstract Cavitation erosion is typically studied with ultrasonic sonotrodes. Only a few attempts have been made to study cavitation erosion of technical alloys on the level of repeated single bubbles. Such single cavitation bubbles can be induced by a focused laser pulse with high spatio-temporal repeatability. In this work, the surface damage caused by series of laser-induced single bubbles in water is observed with a light microscope in-situ between two successive bubbles. Polished samples from pure aluminum, an austenitic steel (316L, X2CrNiMo18-15-3), and a nickel aluminum bronze (CuAl10Ni5Fe5) were subjected to series of bubbles that typically had a maximum diameter of d = 2.5 mm and a non-dimensional stand-off distance γ = 1.4. Via in-situ microscopy, the appearance of individual pits can be assigned to a specific, single bubble collapse event without removing the sample. Consistent with literature, for the chosen parameters the damaged region after many bubbles is circular, with individual pits that are deeper for aluminum than for the bronze and the steel. Additionally, our findings suggest that even high-strength materials can be damaged by the impact of just one single bubble, while not every single bubble causes a pit on the soft aluminum. From series of images after each bubble, the rate of pit accumulation was determined to be 2.6 pits/bubble for aluminum and around 0.3–0.5 pits/bubble for the two technical alloys.