Particulate Projectiles Driven by Cavitation Bubbles

The removal of surface-attached particles with cavitation bubbles is usually attributed to the jetting or shear stresses when bubbles collapse. In this work, we report an unexpected phenomenon that millimeter-sized spherical particles made of heavy metals (e.g., stainless steel), when initially resting on a fixed rigid substrate, are suddenly accelerated like projectiles through the production of nearby laser-induced cavitation bubbles of similar sizes. We show experimentally and theoretically that the motion of a particle with radius R_p is determined by the maximum bubble radius R_b,max, the initial distance from the laser focus to the center of the particle L₀, and the initial azimuth angle φ₀. We identify two dominant regimes for the particle's sudden acceleration, namely, the unsteady liquid inertia dominated regime and the bubble contact dominated regime, determined by R_b,maxR_p=L₀². We find the nondimensional maximum vertical displacement of the particle follows the fourth power and the square power scaling laws for respective regimes, which is consistent with the experimental results. Our findings can be applied to nonintrusive particle manipulation from solid substrates in a liquid.