Studies on Underwater Electric Discharge and Associated Pressure Waves

Abstract

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 H 2 O and a mixture of H 2 O / D 2 O and pure D 2 O as a liquid. The energy-storage capacitor is charged by using a high voltage DC power supply (up to 70 kV).