Cavitation is one of the most damaging things that can happen in your fluid power system. It’s a great way to shorten the life of your components, thanks to the relentless pitting it can exact on metal parts. While there are countless videos online that discuss cavitation, these six are our favorites …

Cavitation in a water pump

While this demonstration doesn’t use high pressure oil hydraulics, it does a great job of explaining how cavitation occurs. Brilliantly, it uses an acrylic pump and acrylic piping, so you can really see what’s happening as the narrator closes the suction valve. As the vapor bubbles collapse and return to their liquid form, it sounds like there are rocks passing through the pipes—testament to the awful destruction that cavitation can impart on your system.

Vacuum bubbles!

These two French guys seem to be just horsing around in their backyard, but some amazing close-up, incredibly slowed-down camera angles show exactly what is happening when cavitation bubbles act on the bottom of a glass bottle.

Cavitation—Easily explained!

While this may at first seem like a boring classroom lecture (and don’t get us started on the British-robotic-sounding narrator), it includes some really fantastic animations, as well as ultra-slow-motion footage of cavitation bubbles actually forming and collapsing.

Cavitation demo

While, at its heart, this is a sales video, it does a nice job on the basics. Both microjets and local pressure waves are covered in this video, which also discusses the additional issues of vibration and noise in systems. This video also has some nice, easy-to-understand animations of how cavitation happens, as well as some ways to avoid cavitation.

Implosive cavitation

Water vs. rocks. Who do you think’s gonna win? This old NOVA video describes the battle; it’s a fun throwback and interesting to watch.

Cavitation Causes and Effects

This video is a nicely done classroom style description of how cavitation forms and what it does to industrial equipment.