Cavitation onset caused by acceleration

In the summer of 2017 we published a seminal work with the help of our collaborators in Japan. The work is seminal because it highlights a different cavitation phenomenon where cavitation occurs when the pressure in a fluid goes below the vapor pressure by a sudden acceleration rather than the traditional velocity method. In the acceleration method the fluid doesn’t really have to be moving at all (velocity = 0) but there are instances where cavitation can occur and that is when the acceleration of the object is suddenly larger than the difference between the surrounding pressure and the vapor pressure (pressure at which a liquid boils or forms vapor at a given temperature. The work also highlights how a liquid filled bottle can break by a sudden tap on the top. Some youtubers have falsely tried to claim that the bottle breaks because of the large pressure captured inside the bottle by ones hand but we show that you don’t have to seal the bottle to break it. Instead our accelerometers synchronized with high speed cameras (25,000 fps) show that the impact on the top of the bottle creates cavitation at the bottom that then collapses onto one small spot, thus concentrating the energy input into a small area sort of like how a glass window can be shattered with a sharp hammer. Check out our YouTube video that Mark Rober later produced.