J. L. Marsh’s research while affiliated with Iowa State University and other places

Cavitation bubble collapse is a hypothesized mechanism of blast-induced traumatic brain injury (bTBI) at the cellular length scale. However, experiments and simulations of cavitation reported in the literature tend to present different bubble sizes and pressure conditions. Thus, making it challenging to understand cavitation as a bTBI mechanism. The following study applies a shock tube model to generate and record cavitation bubbles at biologically realistic temperatures. The results from the shock tube experiments include bubble size and collapse time, which are compared with typical simulation results from molecular dynamics. Numerical estimations for the pressure inside bubbles at the time of collapse and the velocity of water jets are also compared with values from existing literature. The study demonstrates the utility and capability of a shock tube model to gather novel data including visual recordings on cavitation bubble dynamics under different parameter combinations (pressure, temperature, bubble size). The results from this study will aid in connecting existing literature related to cavitation as a bTBI mechanism to help understand the scaling of cavitation behavior under biological conditions.