Inertia controlled instability and small scale structures of sheet and cloud cavitation

Abstract

The present investigation focuses on the numerical simulation of inertia driven dynamics of 3-D sheet and cloud cavitation on a 2-D NACA 0015 hydrofoil. Special emphasis is put on the numerical analysis of the re-entrant flow, the break-up of the sheet cavity and the formation of clouds. We demonstrate that our CFD-Tool CATUM (CAvitation Technische Universität Mu?nchen) is able to predict even delicate 3-D flow features such as irregular break-up patterns, cavitating hairpin and horseshoe vortices, 3-D instabilities in spanwise direction and the formation and propagation of shocks due to collapsing clouds close to the trailing edge of the hydrofoil. The numerically predicted flow features agree well with the experimental observations of Kawanami et al [1].