Some notes on numerical simulation and error analyses of the attached turbulent cavitating flow by LES

Abstract

In this letter, the attached turbulent cavitating flow around the Clark-Y hydrofoil is investigated by the numerical simulation with special emphasis on error analysis of large eddy simulation (LES) for the unsteady cavitation simulation. The numerical results indicate that the present simulation can capture the periodic cavity shedding behavior and show a fairly good agreement with the available experimental data. Further analysis demonstrates that the cavitation has a great influence on LES numerical error and modeling error. The modeling error and numerical error are almost on the same order of magnitude, while the modeling error often shows a little bit larger magnitude than numerical error. The numerical error and modeling error sometimes can partially offset each other if they have the opposite sign. Besides, our results show that cavitation can extend the magnitudes and oscillation levels of numerical error and modeling error.