Abstract
The main objective of the present study is to design a bubble collecting section for use in ventilated supercavitation experiments. The large amounts of air ventilated around a cavitator split into small bubbles that follow the water’s passage through the water tunnel. The presence of these bubbles in the test section of the water tunnel prevents effective observation of supercavitation. To enable the clear observation of cavitation shape, a bubble collecting section with large volume is necessary upstream of the test section to collect bubbles. The buoyancy of bubbles provides a simple means for their collection. However, the bubbly flows in such systems have rather high velocities and a non-uniform velocity distribution, which degrades the buoyancy effect. In the present study, a bubble collecting section with three porous plates that produce a uniformly low velocity distribution is designed and analyzed with numerical methods. The effectiveness of this approach is assessed experimentally with the 1/10 miniature model. The reduction of the void fraction downstream of the bubble collecting section was also assessed in the test section. The bubble collecting section in the full-scale water tunnel was also eventually found to be well designed through flow speed measurements and bubble visualization in the test section.
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Recommended by Associate Editor Weon Gyu Shin
Bu-Geun Paik is a Principal Research Scientist of Advanced Ship Research Division, KRISO, Republic of Korea. He received doctoral degree at POSTECH, Korea on 2005. His research interests are flow visualization, cavitation control around ship and underwater body and drag reduction using passive and active control methods.
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Paik, BG., Park, IR., Kim, KS. et al. Design of a bubble collecting section in a high speed water tunnel for ventilated supercavitation experiments. J Mech Sci Technol 31, 4227–4235 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-017-0821-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-017-0821-x