An examination of thermal modeling affects to the numerical prediction of large-scale cavitating fluid flow

Abstract

The importance of modeling thermal effects in cavitatingfluid is examined in the context of computational fluid dynamics. Simulations of cavitation in water are used to study the effects of thermal versus and pressure variations in the fluid properties, and their impact on predictions. These studies are extended to evaluate energyconserving approaches compared to isothermal ones, to assess the underlying thermal models influence on the predicted cavities occurring in water. Results indicate that the thermal effects remain important, but only for specific applications that need high-frequency phenomena from the numerical simulation. Low-frequency measures, needed for loading analysis, appear to be relatively insensitive to thermal effects. Lastly, various thermally driven cavitation problems requiring energy-equation conservation are presented to display applications requiring such a formulation.