Cavitation occurring in capillary tubes

Highlights: • Cavitation surface etching has never been reported in a continuous capillary tube. • Meanwhile, acoustic tinkling signals in a operating OHP were recognized decades ago with lack of physical understanding. • This letter reported phenomenon and mechanism of cavitation erosion in capillary pipes with oscillating two-phase flow. -- Abstract: Surface etches caused by cavitation often occur behind the blade of a rapidly rotating propeller or on a vibrating surface where liquid is subjected to suddenly reduced or oscillating saturation pressure. This phenomenon has never been reported in a continuous capillary pipe in which flow pressure varied gently without injection of external radiation energy. On the other aspect, acoustically tinkling signals were recognized decades ago during operation of the oscillation capillary heat pipe, but lacking of vigorous scientific understanding of the root causes. In this article, we report cavitation and its surface etches in meandering capillary tubes with the inner diameter of 1.8 mm. Numerous etching pits were observed on the interior face at the heat rejection region after over 200 hours operation. Irregular copper debris, with sizes ranging from 20 to 500 μm, is found in the reclaimed operating fluid. Analysis of temperature and acoustic data indicates that, driven by spiking temperature difference, highly turbulent two-phase flow carries the saturated vapor bubbles from the evaporator to the subcooled condensation region in a very short time of oscillation, turning vapor phase into oversaturated status. Rapid condensation accelerated shrinkage of the vapor bubbles causing strong micro jet impingement to damage the pipe wall, radiating acoustical signals.