Studies on Underwater Electric Discharge and Associated Pressure Waves

<p>Pulsed electric discharges in a liquid with the sufficiently wide range of energy contributions to them can generate diverging shock waves. А significant part of this energy is carried away by these waves from the center of the system to its periphery. At the same time, pulsed plasma-liquid systems limited by reflecting walls of both cylindrical and spherical geometry are insufficiently studied. A fundamental feature of such systems is the generation of a sequence of both diverging and converging (reflected) shock waves by a single pulse discharge. It was shown earlier that in a cylindrical plasma-liquid system with a height of the cylinder (h) comparable with the interelectrode distance (d), radius of the cylinder base R (at R >> h), when discharge current is increased, the ratio of the second diverging shock wave amplitude to the amplitude of the first diverging shock wave can be → 1. This leads to effective return of the energy carried away to the periphery back to the center of the system by converging shock waves. The collapse of the converging shock waves and initiated processes in the center of such plasma-fluid systems can be very interesting. The paper presents the results of experimental studies of pulsed cylindrical plasma-liquid system using both H₂O and a mixture of H₂O / D₂O and pure D₂O as a liquid. The energy-storage capacitor is charged by using a high voltage DC power supply (up to 70 kV).</p>

Studies on Underwater Electric Discharge and Associated Pressure Waves

<p>Pulsed electric discharges in a liquid with the sufficiently wide range of energy contributions to them can generate diverging shock waves. А significant part of this energy is carried away by these waves from the center of the system to its periphery. At the same time, pulsed plasma-liquid systems limited by reflecting walls of both cylindrical and spherical geometry are insufficiently studied. A fundamental feature of such systems is the generation of a sequence of both diverging and converging (reflected) shock waves by a single pulse discharge. It was shown earlier that in a cylindrical plasma-liquid system with a height of the cylinder (h) comparable with the interelectrode distance (d), radius of the cylinder base R (at R >> h), when discharge current is increased, the ratio of the second diverging shock wave amplitude to the amplitude of the first diverging shock wave can be → 1. This leads to effective return of the energy carried away to the periphery back to the center of the system by converging shock waves. The collapse of the converging shock waves and initiated processes in the center of such plasma-fluid systems can be very interesting. The paper presents the results of experimental studies of pulsed cylindrical plasma-liquid system using both H₂O and a mixture of H₂O / D₂O and pure D₂O as a liquid. The energy-storage capacitor is charged by using a high voltage DC power supply (up to 70 kV).</p>

Converging shock waves in a Van der Waals gas of variable density

Summary The converging problem of cylindrically or spherically symmetric strong shock wave collapsing at the axis/centre of symmetry, is studied in a non-ideal inhomogeneous gaseous medium. Here, we assume that the undisturbed medium is spatially variable and the density of a gas is decreasing towards the axis/centre according to a power law. In the present work, we have used the perturbation technique to the implosion problem and obtained a global solution that also admits Guderley’s asymptotic solution in a very good agreement which holds only in the vicinity of the axis/centre of implosion. The similarity exponents together with their corresponding amplitudes are determined by expanding the flow parameters in powers of time. We also refined the leading similarity exponents near the axis/centre of convergence. We compared our calculated results with the already existing results and found them in good agreements up to two decimal places. Shock position and flow parameters are analysed graphically with respect to the variation of values of different parameters. It is observed that an increase in the density variation index, adiabatic exponent and Van der Waals excluded volume, causes the time of shock collapse to decrease due to which the shock acceleration gets increased and shock reaches the axis/centre much faster.