Abstract: Cavitation is a common phenomenon in fluid machinery. The research on cavitation involves the generation, movement and collapse of cavitation structures, analysing and obtaining the impact load caused by cavitation, and evaluating the impact resistance of specific materials become more important. Due to the complex physical mechanism, the wide spatial and temporal scales involved in the generation and collapse of cavitation structures, there are many challenges in carrying out research on cavitation structure collapse and cavitation risk estimation. We attempt to review the theoretical, numerical and experimental research progress in the collapse and damage of cloud cavitation structures, and then introduce the preliminary work on cavitation erosion risk estimation based on energy transport, and finally discuss the possible future research directions in this field.