This is the first book for decades to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive treatment of CAVITATION - the formation of bubbles (or cavities) in a liquid. An introductory chapter, providing an historical background and various important definitions, is followed by a chapter on the theory and analysis of bubble dynamics. Two major chapters, on acoustic cavitation and hydrodynamic cavitation, offer a complete treatment of the work that has taken place in these two important strands of cavitation, and provide a wealth of information on the important applications of cavitation in engineering and science. Sonoluminescence is introduced in Chapter 5, and sonochemistry is discussed in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 covers the numerous methods of bubble spectrum analysis and includes a survey of recent techniques and machines currently available. Chapter 8 contains a wide variety of examples of cavitation, from civil engineering and mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry and medicine.

Hydraulic switching control attempts to transfer concepts from modern electrical drive control to hydraulics. Both, electrical and hydraulic switching systems can achieve higher efficiency than resistance control. In this paper, the hydraulic pendants of the electrical Buck-Converter and Cuk-Converter are introduced. Basically, the hydraulic switching converters consist of switching elements (fast valves), inductances and capacities. The active valves are typically switching at a certain frequency in PWM-mode. The Buck-Converter is a traditional step down converter, so the pressure at the load is always lower than the supply pressure. The concept of the Cuk-Converter even allows to boost the load pressure up to a higher level than the available supply pressure. But it is much more difficult to realize the hydraulic switching converters than their electrical pendants. The wave propagation in the fluid, the impossibility to realize a pure inductivity and the nonlinearities of the hydraulic elements are major difficulties. This paper gives an idea of the basic converter concepts and the difficulties concerning the realization of such drives. Further the results of simulations and measurements are presented.