The oscillation of a laser-generated single cavitation bubble near a solid boundary is investigated by a fiber-optic diagnostic technique based on optical beam deflection (OBD). The maximum bubble radii and collapse time for each oscillation cycle are determined from a sequence of bubble oscillations. Furthermore, by combining the revised Rayleigh theory, the prolongation factor k at different dimensionless parameter g (g ¼ L=Rmax, where Rmax is the maximum bubble radius and L is the distance of a cavity inception point from a boundary) is obtained. In addition, the prolongation factor of the collapse time versus laser energy is also derived, which are valuable in the fields of hydraulic cavitation, laser lithotripsy and laser ophthalmology.

It was found that ethanol and water molecules mixed together can form new clusters. Based on the steady state spectral characteristic and the mole ratio method, three possible bonding constants of ethanol-water clusters were deduced. To confirm the structure of these clusters, the fluorescence lifetimes of different emission bands were investigated, and the average lifetime of the entire decay process was found to vary as the volume percent of ethanol changed. Furthermore, the possible bonding constant n of molecular clusters was determined to be 2 based on the time-resolved spectra, and the cluster was concluded to be a chain structure formed by one ethanol molecule and two water molecules with hydrogen bonds.

A new simple optical system based on optical beam deflection combining the holophote corner cube was developed in order to study the dynamics of laser-induced shock waves in air. In this method, we adopt a He–Ne laser beam as the detection beam. The He–Ne laser beam, reflected by corner cube, intersects the propagating shock wave at two successive positions. The measurement of the shock wave velocity benefits from the double peak signals induced by the same acting laser pulse, which is calculated from the time interval between the corresponding oscilloscope signals and the distance of the two He–Ne laser beams. By virtue of this setup, we are also able to determine the pressure of the generated shock waves. It is shown that this method is simple with a fairly good precision and is much easier than the conventional methods used for this task.

Laser speckle velocimetry (LSV) is presented to measure the velocities of nanoparticles in nanofluids and its feasibility is verified in this paper. An optical scattering model of a single nanoparticle is developed and numerical computations are done to simulate the formation of the speckles by the addition of the complex amplitudes of the scattering lights from multiple nanoparticles. Then relative experiments are done to form speckles when nanofluids are illuminated by a laser beam. The results of the experiments are in agreement with the numerical results, which verify the feasibility of utilizing LSV to measure the velocities of nanoparticles in nanofluids.