Critical Tension in a Liquid under Dynamic Conditions of Stressing

EXPERIMENTS have been described1–3 in which a pulse of compression is propagated upwards through a liquid column and then downwards as a pulse of tension after reflexion at the free surface of the liquid. Here we report that the maximum tension in the reflected pulse tends to an upper limiting value as the peak pressure amplitude in the incident pulse is increased, thus showing quite convincingly that there is a critical value for the maximum tension which the liquid can sustain in these conditions.