On the Design of Cavitation Susceptibility Meters

Abstract

The observation of cavitation in C. S. M. 's at the throat of a Venturi tube provides an ideally simple and direct method to monitor the liquid quality in terms of the concentration of unstable nuclei as a function of the applied tension. The most important deductions are that: (1) the pressure in the cavitation region is an extremely sensitive parameter and cannot be directly measured with the necessary accuracy. It is therefore proposed to deduce the pressure from the potential core velocity at the throat obtained by using a L. D. V. ; (2) the volume of the cavitation region must be reduced as much as possible in order to increase the applied tension without incurring in large errors due to nuclei interference; and (3) the time response of cavitation nuclei imposes a lower bound for the length of the cavitation region