Dynamics of attached turbulent cavitating flows

Abstract

Stationary and non-stationary characteristics of attached, turbulent cavitating flows around solid objects are reviewed. Different cavitation regimes, including incipient cavitation with traveling bubbles, sheet cavitation, cloud cavitation, and supercavitation, are addressed along with both visualization and quantitative information. Clustered hairpin type of counter-rotating vapor vortices at incipient cavitation, and finger-like structure in the leading edge and an oscillatory, wavy structure in the trailing edge with sheet cavitation are assessed. Phenomena such as large-scale vortex structure and rear re-entrant jet associated with cloud cavitation, and subsequent development in supercavitation are described. Experimental evidence indicates that the lift and drag coefficients are clearly affected by the cavitating flow structure, reaching minimum and maximum, respectively, at cloud cavitation. Computationally, progress has been made in Navier–Stokes (N–S) based solution techniques. Issues including suitable algorithm development for treating large density jump across phase boundaries, turbulence and cavitation models, and interface tracking are discussed. While satisfactory predictions in wall pressure distribution can be made in various cases, aspects such as density and stress distributions exhibit higher sensitivity to modeling details. A perspective of future research needs in computational modeling is offered.