Ripping Apart Liquids with Acceleration*

What happens to a liquid when you pull on it really hard? Our intuition might say that the liquid will rip apart, or cavitate. To answer this question, we experimentally accelerate submerged disks up to 25,000 g and observe cavitation onset with high-speed photography. We find that the required acceleration for cavitation onset decreases as disk diameter increases for small disks. However, above a critical disk diameter the required acceleration for cavitation onset appears to become nearly constant. Using added mass and acoustic arguments, we develop a theoretical model to predict cavitation onset in both small- and large-disk-diameter regimes. Our findings explain how the acceleration-based cavitation number can be used to predict cavitation in common submerged flows.