Optical in-situ analysis of the cavitation damage on technical alloys under repeated single bubbles

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With time, cavitation – that is, the formation and collapse of gas bubbles in liquids – can damage the surface even of high-strength materials. The resistance of materials to cavitation is typically investigated using ultrasound sonotrodes. Due to the large number and stochastic nature of the acoustically generated bubbles, in general the resulting damage cannot be assigned to individual bubble events. However, by means of focused laser pulses it is possible to generate individual bubbles that are precisely reproducible in location and time. Besides many studies on the fluid dynamics of the collapsing bubble, some works examine the effect of such individual bubbles on a deformable solid surface. With few exceptions, the sample is from a soft material, such that the deformation resulting from a single bubble can be correlated with its dynamics. However, it is unclear how these results can be transferred to higher-strength materials.The proposed project aims at this knowledge gap between microscopically uncontrolled damage to technical alloys by acoustic cavitation on one hand and precisely reproducible loading on soft materials by individual bubbles on the other. Series of single bubbles will provide defined, repeated stress on surfaces of technical alloys. The dynamics of each bubble are recorded by imaging, then after each bubble collapse the incremental increase in damage is recorded in situ by optical microscopy, and this is complemented by high-resolution ex-situ techniques to yield a detailed picture of the damage evolution. This enables examining the development of damage during the incubation and erosion phases in unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution, as well as correlating the details of the collapse processes with material changes. In parallel, standard tests with a sonotrode are performed to put this damage into context with what is generally known about the materials’ cavitation resistance.First, microscopy optics are integrated into an existing single-bubble experiment and synchronized with high-speed visualization of the bubbles. Using samples from a soft material, this in-situ imaging is validated by ex-situ confocal microscopy. In a second step, series of tests are carried out on NiAl bronze and 316L steel in order to develop semi-automated methods to efficiently evaluate the very large data sets and to correlate in-situ and ex-situ microscopy. Finally, these methods are used in experiments on both materials, in which the number of bubbles, their distance from the sample surface, and the bubble diameter are varied. Ex-situ, the damage mechanisms in the technical alloys are analyzed in detail by high-resolution electron microscopy and compared with samples from experiments with ultrasonic cavitation according to ASTM G32. The extensive data generated in this project will be made publicly accessible, in particular for modeling work outside of the project.