Postdoc on heterogenous cavitation

We are looking for a post-doc to join our research team and perform experiment on heterogeneous cavitation to explore the origin of cavitation nuclei.

The apparition of macroscopic bubbles inside a liquid either by boiling when temperature increases, from cavitation when pressure decreases or in supersaturated solution (large quantity of dissolved gas) originates from nano/microscopic bubbles, named nuclei. These nuclei are trapped in surface defects or stabilized by floating impurities. The nucleation, in this case, is called heterogeneous in opposition to the homogeneous nucleation occurring without pre-existing nuclei which required tremendous excitation, e.g. -140 MPa for the cavitation [1]. Although the nuclei are usually assumed to be formed during liquid immersion, we recently show that they can also spontaneously appear [2]. The aim of the overall project is to unravel the mechanism responsible for this generation of nuclei.