  Although there have been extensive investigations characterizing cavitation
phenomenon in fuel injectors, much is still unknown about the mechanisms
driving cavitation-induced erosion, and how these complicated physics should be
represented in a model. In lieu of computationally expensive fluid-structure
interaction modeling, the Eulerian mixture modeling approach has been accepted
as an efficient means of capturing cavitation phenomena. However, there remains
a need to link the erosive potential of cloud collapse events with the
subsequent material deformation and damage of neighboring surfaces. Even though
several cavitation erosion indices have been proposed in the literature, no
single metric has been identified as universally applicable across all
injector-relevant conditions. The objective of this work is to identify
parameters that characterize the erosive potential of cavitation cloud collapse
mechanisms that are likely to occur within injector orifices. While a commonly
employed cavitation erosion metric, namely the maximum local pressure, was
found to provide indications of potential sites for pitting and material
rupture from single impact events, no additional information could be
determined regarding the material erosion process. To improve representation of
the incubation period within the cavitation erosion process, a new metric was
derived based on cumulative energy absorbed by the solid material from repeated
hydrodynamic impacts. Through evaluation of predicted cavitation cloud collapse
events in a channel geometry against available experimental data, the stored
energy metric yielded insight into the erosive potential of recorded impact
events. The stored energy metric provided a means to accurately predict the
influence of flow conditions on the incubation period before material erosion.
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