Bubbly cavitating flow generation and investigation of its erosional nature for biomedical applications

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2011.2107322

The paper presents a study of the generation of hydrodynamic bubbly cavitation in microchannels to investigate the destructive energy output resulting from this phenomenon and its potential use in biomedical applications. The research performed in this study includes the experimental results from bubbly cavitation experiments and the findings showing the destructive effects of bubbly cavitating flow on selected solid specimens and live cells. The bubbles generated by hydrodynamic cavitation are highly destructive at the surfaces of the target medium, on which they are carefully focused. The resulting destructive energy output could be effectively used for good means such as destroying kidney stones (renal calculi) or killing cancer cells. Motivated by this potential, the cavitation damage to cancerous cells and material removal from chalk pieces (which possess similar material properties as some kidney stones) was investigated. Hence the potential of hydrodynamic bubbly cavitation generated at the microscale for biomedical treatments was revealed using the microchannel configuration as a microorifice (with an inner diameter of 147 µm and a length of 1.52cm), which is the source of bubbly cavitating flow.