Cavitation in a soft porous material

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>We study the collapse and expansion of a cavitation bubble in a deformable porous medium. We develop a continuum-scale model that couples compressible fluid flow in the pore network with the elastic response of a solid skele...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Leng, Yu, Vlachos, Pavlos P, Juanes, Ruben, Gomez, Hector
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford University Press (OUP) 2023
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148584
Description
Summary:<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>We study the collapse and expansion of a cavitation bubble in a deformable porous medium. We develop a continuum-scale model that couples compressible fluid flow in the pore network with the elastic response of a solid skeleton. Under the assumption of spherical symmetry, our model can be reduced to an ordinary differential equation that extends the Rayleigh–Plesset equation to bubbles in soft porous media. The extended Rayleigh–Plesset equation reveals that finite-size effects lead to the breakdown of the universal scaling relation between bubble radius and time that holds in the infinite-size limit. Our data indicate that the deformability of the porous medium slows down the collapse and expansion processes, a result with important consequences for wide-ranging phenomena, from drug delivery to spore dispersion.</jats:p>