Analysis of shock waves in liquids: a study of noninvasive fracturing of kidney stones

An explicit solution of a liquid/liquid shock tube was derived that was used to evaluate the accuracy of a numerical method which was developed to calculate shock dynamics and resulting flow fields in water. The numerical code was found to be quite efficient in solving the evolution of shock propagation in water. The calculation was then extended to nonlinear effects in spherically symmetric blast waves in water for simulating the shock pressure induced by unconfined focused laser breakdown measured by Russell (1986). Also given was a discussion of the degree to which the focused laser breakdown process can be treated acoustically and the significance of nonlinear effects. Good agreement among the numerical, theoretical, and experimental data is found and areas for further investigation are suggested. The practical application motivating this work is shock waves induced by focused laser radiation to fracture a patient's kidney stones so that the resulting fragments can be passed through the urinary system.