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High-fidelity numerical simulation of unsteady cavitating flow around a hydrofoil

  • Special Column on the 33rd NCHD-Second Part (Guest Editor Zheng Ma)
  • Published:
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Abstract

Cavitation is a widespread and detrimental phenomenon in hydraulic machinery, therefore, it requires to be accurately predicted. In this study, large eddy simulation (LES), scale-adaptive simulation (SAS) and grid-adaptive simulation (GAS) are employed to investigate the unsteady cavitating flow around a NACA0009 hydrofoil. The prediction accuracy of GAS, SAS, both using the shear-stress transport (SST) k — ω model as baseline turbulence model, is validated by comparing with experimental and LES results. The cavity behaviors and turbulence fields are analyzed systematically. Results show that the GAS gives a more reasonable turbulent viscosity and accurately predicts the periodic evolution of typical vortical structures of cavitating flow, such as tip leakage vortex cavitation, tip separation vortex cavitation, leading-edge cavitation, and trailing-edge vortex. The time-averaged cavity volume, volume fluctuation amplitude, and characteristic frequencies of cavities predicted by the GAS are very closed to the LES, while the SAS fails to accurately capture these cavity characteristics. Furthermore, the local trace criterion is applied to extract the vortical structures and to analyze the swirling patterns of the tip leakage vortex. Multi-scale vortical structures in LES are well identified by local trace criterion. The prediction accuracy of the SAS method for small-scale vortical structures, such as the vortex shedding on the suction side and the vortex rope around the tip leakage vortex, is obviously insufficient, while the GAS has a higher accuracy in predicting vortex shedding. The tip leakage vortex and induced vortex extracted from GAS are also closer to that of LES in both swirling patterns and scale.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science and Technology Major Project (Grant No. 2017-II-003-0015), the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2018ZB51013) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. The authors also would like to thank Matthieu Dreyer for providing the experimental results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Energy and Power Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Nan Xie, Yu-meng Tang & Yang-wei Liu

  2. National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Aero-Engine Aero-Thermodynamics, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Nan Xie, Yu-meng Tang & Yang-wei Liu

Authors
  1. Nan Xie
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  2. Yu-meng Tang
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Correspondence to Yang-wei Liu.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51976006, 52106039).

Biography: Nan Xie (1995-), Male, Ph. D. Candidate

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Xie, N., Tang, Ym. & Liu, Yw. High-fidelity numerical simulation of unsteady cavitating flow around a hydrofoil. J Hydrodyn 35, 1–16 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42241-023-0014-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42241-023-0014-2

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