It has been found that ventilated cavities extending behind hydrofoils, plates, and other two-dimensional bodies, oscillate when the air supply rate is sufficient to reduce the cavitation number to about one-fifth of its natural value. As the rate increases further, higher modes of oscillation occur in which the cavity–water interface supports several waves that are convected downstream towards the wake, which, owing to a pinching-off action replacing the usual entrainment sink, consists of a sequence of large bubbles drifting downstream. A theory of such flows that allows both for the convected velocity fluctuations in the cavity, and for the transport of bubble volume down the wake, is given in this paper. Coupled with a rather simple phenomenological relation between the pressure fluctuations within the cavity and the departure of the pinched-off rear portion of the cavity—explained in terms of the action of the re-entrant jet—this theory successfully predicts the resonance frequencies obtained in experiments by Silberman & Song.

The theory also provides a solution of the more general problem of determining the fluctuations in the pressure distribution over the whole surface of the body, when it is in a prescribed unsteady motion along its axis of symmetry (the theory is confined to symmetrical bodies and flows). Thus the growth in drag due to a sudden increment in the upstream velocity can be predicted, and also the damping forces acting on the body when it is forced to oscillate at a given frequency. It is shown that in all cases the body is unstable.

One important feature of the mathematical model chosen is that it completely avoids the presence of a time-dependent sink at infinity—with its associated infinite pressures—by conserving total volume of wake and cavity in just the same way as vorticity is conserved in unsteady aerofoil theory.