Experimental and numerical research on cavitating flows around axisymmetric bodies

We investigated the cavitating flows around different axisymmetric bodies based on experiments and numerical simulation. In the numerical simulation, the multiphase Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes equations (RANS) were solved via the commercial computational fluid dynamics code CFX. The modified k-omega SST turbulence model was used along with the transport equation-based cavitation model. In the experiments, a high-speed video technique was used to observe the unsteady cavitating flow patterns, and the dynamic force measurement system was used to measure the hydrodynamics of the axisymmetric bodies under different cavitation conditions. Results are shown for the hemisphere bodies, conical bodies and blunt bodies. Reasonable agreements were obtained between the computational and experimental results. The results show that for the hemispherical body, the cavity consists of quasi-steady transparent region and unsteady foggy water-vapor mixture region, which contains small-scale vortices and is dominated by bubble clusters, causing irregular disturbances at the cavity interfaces. The curvature at the front of the conical body is larger, resulting in that the flow separates at the shoulder of the axisymmetric body. The cavity stretches downstream and reaches to a fixed cavity length and shape. For blunt bodies, the incipient cavitation number is larger than that for the hemispherical body. A large cloud cavity is formed at the shoulder of the blunt body in the cores of vortices in high shear separation regions and the re-entrant jet does not significantly interact with the cavity interface when it moves upstream. As to the dynamic characteristics of unsteady cavitating flows around the axisymmetric bodies, the pulsation frequency for the hemispherical body is larger than that for the blunt body. For the hemispherical body, the pulsation is mainly caused by the high-frequency, small-scale shedding at the rear end of the cavity, while for the blunt body, the main factor for the pulsation frequency is the periodically shedding of large-scale vortex cavities.