CAVITATION AND BUBBLE DYNAMICS
by Christopher Earls Brennen © Oxford University Press 1995
Preface to the original OUP hardback edition
This book is intended as a combination of a reference book for those who work with cavitation or bubble dynamics and as a monograph for advanced students interested in some of the basic problems associated with this category of multiphase flows. A book like this has many roots. It began many years ago when, as a young postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, I was asked to prepare a series of lectures on cavitation for a graduate course cum seminar series. It was truly a baptism by fire, for the audience included three of the great names in cavitation research, Milton Plesset, Allan Acosta, and Theodore Wu, none of whom readily accepted superficial explanations. For that, I am immensely grateful. The course and I survived, and it evolved into one part of a graduate program in multiphase flows.
There are many people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for the roles they played in making this book possible. It was my great good fortune to have known and studied with six outstanding scholars, Les Woods, George Gadd, Milton Plesset, Allan Acosta, Ted Wu, and Rolf Sabersky. I benefited immensely from their scholarship and their friendship. I also owe much to my many colleagues in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers whose insights fill many of the pages of this monograph. The support of my research program by the Office of Naval Research is also greatly appreciated. And, of course, I feel honored to have worked with an outstanding group of graduate students at Caltech, including Sheung-Lip Ng, Kiam Oey, David Braisted, Luca d'Agostino, Steven Ceccio, Sanjay Kumar, Douglas Hart, Yan Kuhn de Chizelle, Beth McKenney, Zhenhuan Liu, Yi-Chun Wang, and Garrett Reisman, all of whom studied aspects of cavitating flows.
The book is dedicated to Doreen, my companion and friend of over thirty years, who tolerated the obsession and the late nights that seemed necessary to bring it to completion. To her I owe more than I can tell.
Christopher Earls Brennen, Pasadena, Calif.
June 1994
Preface to the Internet edition
Though my conversion of "Cavitation and Bubble Dynamics" from the hardback book to HTML is rough in places, I am so convinced of the promise of the web that I am pleased to offer this edition freely to those who wish to use it. This new medium clearly involves some advantages and some disadvantages. The opportunity to incorporate as many color photographs as I wish (and perhaps even some movies) is a great advantage and one that I intend to use in future modifications. Another advantage is the ability to continually correct the manuscript though I will not undertake the daunting task of trying to keep it up to date. A disadvantage is the severe limitation in HTML on the use of mathematical symbols. I have only solved this problem rather crudely and apologize for this roughness in the manuscript.
In addition to those whom I thanked earlier, I would like to express my thanks to my academic home, the California Institute of Technology, for help in providing the facilities used to effect this conversion, and to the Sherman-Fairchild Library at Caltech whose staff provided much valuable assistance. I am also most grateful to Oxford University Press for their permission to place this edition on the internet.
Christopher Earls Brennen, Pasadena, Calif.
July 2002