Cavitation shares the same physical process as boiling which is described in the
Multiphase module. Fundamentally, both cavitation and boiling are the evaporation and condensation process between liquid and vapor phases. However, the mechanisms that trigger the phase changes are different. Cavitation is predominately caused by mechanical effects which are the sharp pressure changes in fluid systems. Boiling is due to thermal effects that raise the vaporization pressure of a liquid above its local ambient pressure to cause the phase change from liquid to vapor. Therefore, cavitation is generally treated separately from the thermal phase changes as the cavitation process is too rapid to assume thermal equilibrium at the liquid-vapor interface. In many standard cavitation models, the mass transfer is treated as driven purely by liquid-vapor pressure differences. However, thermal effects are included by allowing the phase densities and the saturation vapor pressure as the function of temperature.