Challenging Problems on Ventilated Cavitation and Paths to Their Computational Solutions

Abstract

Ventilated cavitation has been successfully employed as ship drag reduction technology and potentially can mitigate flow-induced vibration. The obtained successes were based on solutions of design problems considered in the framework of ideal fluid theory with their following validation by towing tank tests. However, various aspects of the interaction of ventilated cavities with the viscous flows around the ship hulls remain unclear, whereas there is usually no possibility to simultaneously keep the full-scale Froude number and cavitation number in the test facilities. So, the further progress of the application of ventilated cavitation substantially depends on the ability of computational tools to predict this interaction. This paper briefly describes the state-of-the-art computation of ventilated cavitation and points out the most challenging unsolved problems that appeared in the model tests (prediction of air demand by cavities, ventilation effect on ship drag, on hydrofoil lift, and on the propagation of shock waves in cavities).