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SEMINAR: The Amazing Cavitation Bubble- from Ship Propellors to Medical Supertools

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Today's date is Friday, March 29, 2024
The Amazing Cavitation Bubble- from Ship Propellors to Medical Supertools : This seminar is part of the Centre for Water Research seminar series. Other events...
We generally think of bubbles as benign and harmless and yet they can manifest the most remarkable range of physical effects. Some of those effects are the stuff of our every day experience as in the tinkling of a brook or the sounds of breaking waves at the beach. But even these mundane effects are examples of the ability of bubbles to gather, focus and radiate energy (acoustic energy in the above examples). In other contexts that focusing of energy can lead to serious technological problems as when cavitation bubbles eat great holes through ships' propeller blades or cause a serious threat to the integrity of the spillways at the Hoover Dam.

In liquid-propelled rocket engines bubbles pose a serious threat to the stability of the propulsion system and in artificial heart valves they can cause serious damage to the red-blood cells. In perhaps the most extraordinary example of energy focusing, collapsing cavitation bubbles can emit not only sound but also light with black body radiation temperatures equal to that of the sun.

But, harnessed carefully, this ability to focus energy can also be put to constructive use. Cavitation bubbles are now used in a remarkable range of surgical and medical procedures, for example to emulsify tissue (most commonly in cataract surgery or in lithotripsy procedures for the reduction of kidney and gall stones) or to manipulate the DNA in individual cells.

By creating cavitation bubbles non-invasively and thereby depositing and focussing energy non-intrusively, one can generate minute incisions or target cancer cells. This lecture will begin by ranging over some of the fundamentals of cavitation and will end with a vision of the new horizons for the amazing bubble, in the process ranging from ship's propellers to medical supertools.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

All Welcome
Speaker(s) Professor Christopher Brennen, Mechanical Engineering, California Institute of Technology
Location Blakers Lecture Room, Ground Floor, Mathematics Building, The University of Western Australia
Contact Askale Abebe <[email protected]> : 6488 7565
URL http://www.its.caltech.edu/~brennen/brennen.html
Start Wed, 04 Mar 2015 16:00
End Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:00
Submitted by Askale Abebe <[email protected]>
Last Updated Thu, 19 Mar 2015 14:27
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