This week in 1932

We recently wrote about a team of marine engineers battling against a process called cavitation while trying to break the outright speed sailing record. The pesky phenomenon occurs across turbine blades – or, in this case, hydrofoil blades – where rapid changes in pressure create tiny bubbles that collapse with huge force causing turbulence and even blade degradation.

So it was interesting to see a discussion of the then recently discovered process in a research article in the February 1932 edition of The Engineer in the context of steam turbines.

’The problem of calculating the stresses produced in a plate by the impact of a drop of fluid is not one that lends itself to any simple mathematical solution, and there appear to be very few data available on the subject,’ said the author FW Gardner.

“A phenomenon that involves the collapse of a vacuous cavity”

’It is known that extremely high pressures may be produced by the hammer action of cavitation, a phenomenon that involves a sudden collapse of a vacuous cavity in a fluid medium.