The best whistler: A cavitating tip vortex

The discrete tone radiated from a cavitating tip vortex, known as “vortex singing,” was first recognized in 1989, but its sound generation mechanism has remained a mystery for over 30 years. In this Letter, by means of the correction for the cavitation bubble dynamics and the dispersion relation of cavity interfacial waves, we found that after the far-end disturbances propagate upstream, the whistling vortex should be triggered by near-end sound sources, the breathing mode waves. Further utilizing the theoretical solutions for singing lines and the potential singing cavitation number with frequency, we accurately identified all available tests for seeking the vortex singing over the past three decades, which not only demonstrates that the vortex singing frequency is only determined by the measurable mean cavity radius (rc), cavitation number (σ), and desinent cavitation number (σd) in experiments, but also responses to a long-standing perplexity: why such a best whistler is able to appear only within a narrow range of the cavitation number.