Cavitation is the formation of vapour filled bubbles in a liquid. They can be generated either by the reduction of the ambient water pressure at constant temperature or by a temperature increase at constant pressure. In the results of the experiments presented in this work a range of different diameter cavitation bubbles were generated by focusing pulses of near IR radiation (le = 1064 nm) from a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser of varying energy in a small water tank. Single exposure high speed shadow photography and Schlieren techniques are used to visualise the oscillating motion of the cavitation bubbles with high temporal and spatial resolution. The optical analysis of the cavitation bubble in free water shows a smooth symmetrical oscillating motion during the first cycle. When the bubble is collapsing near a solid boundary the motion becomes asymmetrical. The Schlieren images in combination with matching plots of a thin film polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) pressure transducer confirm the formation of a liquid jet as well as different shock wave emissions for certain bubble to boundary parameters. They also indicate the importance of the resulting fluid flow to stresses induced in the solid boundary. In an attempt to visualise the fluid flow field around an oscillating cavitation bubble the IR laser radiation is focused in a solution of copper sulphate (CUS04) for contrast enhancement. High speed photography in combination with an accurately positioned Schlieren knife edge displays the heated path of the laser beam and the different shapes of the cavitation bubble. For the case of a bubble in free space the marked laser path indicates radial fluid flow only. For a bubble in front of a solid boundary the marked laser path clearly shows the motion of the fluid into the toroidal shaped bubble during the collapse process. For this case the marked paths are similar to numerically calculated streamline plots. In contrast to the solid boundary a flexible boundary was also used. The interaction of the cavitation bubble with the flexible boundary visualises partially the movement of the water but is found to still destroy some of the symmetry of the bubble.

This work presents information obtained from high-speed video and electrical monitoring of electrical breakdown (discharge) events during plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) of aluminium alloy substrates. Discharges were found to occur in extended sequences termed "cascades" at particular locations. This was a feature common to all the substrates and processing frequencies investigated. As the coating thickness increases, the characteristics remained broadly similar, although discharges become more energetic and longer-lived. Short PEO treatments were applied to existing PEO coatings in order to investigate the microstructural effects of discharge cascades. It was found that cascades persist at particular locations due to the residual deep pore channel left by previous discharges in the cascade. Observations were made of the way the coating was restructured around a cascade location. Samples were illuminated with very high intensity flashes during PEO processing, revealing that relatively large (1 mm diameter) bubbles form where a discharge emerges from the surface of a coating. Analysis of the overall energy consumption, as well as the energetic processes occurring within an individual discharge, indicate that the bubble growth occurs due to rapid volatilisation of water originating from the electrolyte. It is postulated that the growth of this bubble causes the electrical resistance to rise and is responsible for the termination of the discharge current. Investigations of high frequency (2,500 Hz) processing lead to the discovery of discharges occurring during the cathodic half-cycle, after a certain coating thickness had been achieved. Cathodic discharges were more energetic than anodic discharges, and created large craters in the coatings. Gas evolution was found to exceed the electrochemical Faraday yield, and was similar at low and high frequency initially. Once cathodic discharges began, the gas evolution rate increased and the coating mass gain levelled off.

In the form of teacher didactical design research, this work addresses a didactical issue encountered during physics teaching in a Swedish upper secondary school. A need for renewed practical laboratory work related to Newtonian mechanics is met by proposing and designing an activity based on high- speed photography using the nowadays omnipresent smartphone, thus bringing new technology into the classroom. The activity – video analysis of the collision physics of football kicks – is designed and evaluated by following a didactical design cycle. The work elaborates on how the proposed laboratory activity relates to the potential and complications of experimental activities in science education, as described in the vast literature on the topic. It is argued that the use of smartphones constitutes an interesting use of new technology for addressing known problems of practical work. Of particular interest is that smartphones offer a way to bridge the gap between the everyday life of students and the world of physics experiments (smartphones are powerful pocket laboratories). The use of smartphones also avoids using unfamiliar laboratory equipment that is known to hinder focus on intended content, while at the same time exploring a powerful tool for data acquisition and analysis. Overall, the use of smartphones (and computers) in this manner can be seen as the result of applying Occam’s razor to didactics: only familiar and readily available instrumentation is used, and skills learned (movie handling and image analysis) are all educationally worthwhile. Although the activity was judged successful, a systematic investigation of learning outcome was out of scope. This means that no strong conclusions can be drawn based on this limited work. Nonetheless, the smartphone activity was well received by the students and should constitute a useful addition to the set of instructional approaches, especially since variation is known to benefit learning. The main failure of the design was an overestimation of student prior knowledge on motion physics (and its application to image data). As a consequence, the activity took required more time and effort than originally anticipated. No severe pitfalls of smartphone usage were identified, but it should be noted that the proposed activity – with its lack of well-defined results due to variations in kick strength – requires that the teacher is capable of efficiently analysing multiple student films (avoiding the feedback process to become overwhelmingly time consuming). If not all student films are evaluated, the feedback to the students may become of low quality, and misconceptions may pass under the radar. On the other hand, given that programming from 2018 will become compulsory, an interesting development of the activity would be to include handling of images and videos using a high-level programming language like Python.

An equilibrium multielectron bubble (MEB) in liquid helium is a fascinating object with a spherical two-dimensional electron gas on its surface. After it was first observed a few decades ago, a plethora of physical properties of MEBs, for example, a tunable surface electron density, have been predicted. In this thesis, we will discuss two new methods to create MEBs in liquid helium. Before the discussion, the way to generate a large number of electrons in a low temperature system will be discussed, including thermionic emission and field emission in helium. In the first new method to make MEBs, we used a dome-shaped cell filled with superfluid helium in which an MEB was created and confined at the dome. The lifetime of the MEB was substantially longer than the previously reported observations of MEBs. In the second method, MEBs were extracted from the vapor sheath around an electrically heated tungsten filament submerged in liquid helium, either by a high electric field (up to 15 kV/cm) or by a sudden increase of a negative pressure in liquid helium. High-speed photography was used to capture the MEB's motion. A method to determine the number of electrons was developed by monitoring the oscillations of the MEBs. Finally, an electromagnetic trap was designed to localize the MEBs created using the second method, which was important for future studies of the properties of MEBs. / Physics

Diese Dissertation widmet sich der Erfassung, Identifikation und Beschreibung von Entladungsprozessen, die an Überschlägen bei Blitzspannung auftreten. Es wird ein Messsystem entwickelt, welches die elektrischen und optischen Parameter der Entladungsprozesse an der Spitze-Spitze-Elektrodenanordnung bei standardisierter und oszillierender Blitzspannung mit hoher Empfindlichkeit und Synchronisationsgenauigkeit aufzeichnet. Mithilfe der Strommessungen und der fotografischen Aufzeichnungen von Entladungen können drei Phasen des Durchschlagprozesses identifiziert werden: In der Reihenfolge ihres Auftretens handelt es sich um die Streamerphase, die Kanalübergangsphase und die Kanalbildungsphase. Diese Phasen werden für die standardisierte und oszillierende Blitzspannung aufgezeigt, wobei Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede herausgestellt werden. Anhand von statistischen Beschreibungen des Durchschlagverhaltens und des Entladungsverhaltens werden daraufhin Abhängigkeiten in den Entladungsprozessen abgeleitet. / This thesis is dedicated to the acquisition, identification and description of discharge processes, which occur under lightning impulse voltage. A measuring system has been developed that records the electrical and optical parameters of the discharge processes with a high sensitivity and synchronization accuracy on a rod-rod electrode arrangement under standardised and oscillated lightning impulse voltage. With the current measurements and the photographic records of discharges, three phases of the breakdown process can be identified. In order of their occurrence these are the streamer phase, the channel transition phase and the channel formation phase. These phases are shown for the standardised and oscillated lightning impulse voltage, whereby similarities and differences are presented in detail. Using statistical descriptions of the breakdown and the discharge behaviour, dependencies in the discharge process will be derived.