Method of approximate account for the wall effect in cavitation flow around bodies in water tunnels

Abstract

One of the basic questions in the study of advanced cavitation in water tunnels of the closed-circuit type is the establishment of the correspondence between the flow patterns observed in the channel and in an unbounded stream. The objective of the study of the wall effect must be the determination of a connection between the basic characteristics of the phenomenon, i. e., the cavitation numbers, the cavity dimensions, the drag coefficients, etc., for the unbounded flow and the channel flow. A large number of works devoted to this question are known [1–7], but in the majority of them only two-dimensional flows are considered. These studies contain either exact solutions obtained with the aid of the apparatus of functions of a complex variable or solutions in the linearized formulation. At the present time there is urgent need to obtain at least approximate solutions for axisymmetric cavitation flows in a tunnel. In several studies [1, 2, 4] it has been shown that in the case of two-dimensional flows the presence of solid boundaries influences the drag coefficient only through the mechanism of a change of the magnitude of the cavitation number, while the variation of the drag coefficient itself with the cavitation number is not changed in comparison with the unbounded flow. It may be assumed that an analogous situation obtains for the axisymmetric case as well. Then the question of the wall effect may be reduced to establishing the connection between the corresponding cavitation numbers. The present paper makes an attempt to establish the correspondence between the cavitation numbers in the unbounded flow and in the tunnel for which the cavities behind the same body have the same areas of the maximal cross section.