Validation of Wagner theory on coarsening process of cavitation bubbles in oxygen-nitrogen mixture system by molecular dynamics simulation*

Recently, many studies using molecular dynamics (MD) simulation have been conducted for investigating various phenomena of cavitation bubbles. We previously focused on a coarsening process of nanoscale cavitation bubbles in liquid argon as one-component fluid using MD, and confirmed the validity of Wagner theory that expects time-scaling exponent for characteristic length of bubbles with evaporation/condensation (EC) limited and that with Diffusion limited. However, in two-component system, the coarsening process of nanoscale cavitation bubbles has not been investigated. In this study, we simulated the coarsening process in oxygen-nitrogen mixture to investigate the application validity of Wagner theory. As a result, the time-scaling exponents for the characteristic length of bubbles in MD indicated a phenomenon between EC and Diffusion occurs, i.e., coarsening process of bubbles in oxygen-nitrogen system would be also expressed by Wagner theory.