We experimentally examine a laser-induced underwater shock wave paying special attention to the pressure impulse, the time integral of the pressure evolution. Plasma formation, shock-wave expansion and the pressure in water are observed simultaneously using a combined measurement system that obtains high-resolution nanosecond-order image sequences. These detailed measurements reveal a distribution of the pressure peak which is not spherically symmetric. In contrast, remarkably, the pressure impulse is found to be symmetrically distributed for a wide range of experimental parameters, even when the shock waves are emitted from an elongated region. The structure is determined to be a collection of multiple spherical shock waves originating from point-like plasmas in the elongated region.

The background-oriented schlieren (BOS) technique with the physicsbased optical flow method (OF-BOS) is developed for measuring the pressure field of a laser-induced underwater shock wave. Compared to BOS with the conventional cross-correlation method in PIV (called PIV-BOS), by using the OF-BOS, the displacement field generated by the small density gradient in water can be obtained at the spatial resolution of one vector per pixel. The corresponding density and pressure fields can be further extracted. It is particularly demonstrated that the sufficiently high spatial resolution of the extracted displacement vector field is required in the tomographic reconstruction to correctly infer the pressure field of the spherical underwater shock wave. The capability of the OF-BOS is critically evaluated based on synchronized hydrophone measurements. Special emphasis is placed on direct comparison between the OF-BOS with the PIV-BOS. KeywordsBackground-oriented schlieren (BOS) • Optical flow • Crosscorrelation • Particle image velocimetry (PIV), Underwater shock wave

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The development of needle-free injection systems utilizing high-speed microjets is of great importance to world healthcare. It is thus crucial to control the microjets, which is often induced by underwater shock waves. In this contribution from fluid-mechanics point of view, we experimentally investigate the effect of a shock wave on the velocity of a free surface (microjet) and underwater cavitation onset in a microchannel, focusing on the pressure impulse and peak pressure of the shock wave. The shock wave used had a non-spherically-symmetric peak pressure distribution and a spherically symmetric pressure impulse distribution [Tagawa et al., J. Fluid Mech., 2016, 808, 5-18]. First, we investigate the effect of the shock wave on the jet velocity by installing a narrow tube and a hydrophone in different configurations in a large water tank, and measuring the shock wave pressure and the jet velocity simultaneously. The results suggest that the jet velocity depends only on the pressure impulse of the shock wave. We then investigate the effect of the shock wave on the cavitation onset by taking measurements in an L-shaped microchannel. The results suggest that the probability of cavitation onset depends only on the peak pressure of the shock wave. In addition, the jet velocity varies according to the presence or absence of cavitation. The above findings provide new insights for advancing a control method for high-speed microjets.

The conventional background-oriented schlieren (BOS) technique is an image-based technique that can calculate the density field in fluids using two static images [i.e., an undistorted background image (reference image) and a distorted background image due to the density change in fluids (target image)]. This paper proposes the smartphone BOS (SBOS) technique, which offers the measurement of the density gradient using the high-speed imaging feature of the smartphone being carried with a moving observer. The conventional BOS with a fixed camera visualizes the density gradient by comparing the reference image and the target image. In contrast, SBOS can obtain the time difference of the density gradient field. A reference image in SBOS is a target one at a previous time step. The movement of the smartphone is canceled using a registration technique for image accurate alignment. Three demonstrations are conducted to perform SBOS. First, in a static situation, the density field of heated air by a gas burner is visualized by comparing between SBOS and conventional BOS. Second, the local displacement of density field and the error displacement is estimated quantitatively when the smartphone is moving. Third, SBOS using an embossed wallpaper to visualize the density field is performed in the mobile condition. These achievements suggest that SBOS is an effective system to visualize the density field using only the smartphone, and is expected to be a useful tool such as a preliminary experiment in the laboratory and a teaching tool for general smartphone users.