Analysis of ventilated cavitation around a cylinder vehicle with nature cavitation using a new simulation method

Abstract

In the present paper, a new simulation method is developed for unsteady cavitating flow with air ventilation, which is very useful for alleviating the pressure oscillation in hydroturbine draft tube and reducing the drag force on an underwater vehicle. Because the fluid includes three components, i.e., the water, vapor, and air, the interactions between water–air and water–vapor are treated by applying the level set method, and the effect of surface tension is taken into account in governing equations. Further, the phase change between the water and the vapor is modeled by a homogeneous model, where the effect of air injection is considered by applying the air volume fraction in the mass transport equation. For calibration, the cavitating flows around a cylinder vehicle were simulated using the proposed method, and the numerical results were compared with the experimental data at three different ventilation conditions. The good agreement of cavitation evolutions between the simulation and the experiment indicated that the proposed method was acceptable for the simulation of ventilated cavitating flows with nature cavitation and would be usable for various engineering applications. Moreover, the vorticity analysis depicts that the vortex is closely related to cavitation evolution, and air injection much changes the vorticity production in cavitating flow. It was also revealed that vorticities only occurred in regions with high vapor/air volume fraction and the vortex stretching term created the most vorticities.