Experimental and numerical investigation of unsteady cavitating flows through a 2D hydrofoil

In the present study, firstly, the unsteady cavitating flows around a hydrofoil are studied based on the flow visualization and detail velocity measurement, a high-speed video camera is used to visualize the flow structures, and a particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique is applied to the measurement of the time-averaged and instantaneous velocity and vorticity fields. The results show that the unsteadiness of mass transfer process between the vapor and the two-phase regions is substantial, a self-oscillatory behavior of the whole sheet cavitation is obtained, with large length fluctuations and vapor cloud shedding, and also the cavitation structure depends on the interaction of the water-vapor mixture and the periodic vortex shedding. The main purpose of this experimental study is to offer information for validating computational models, and shed light on the unsteady multiphase transport process of cavitating flows. Furthermore, with an emphasis on the dynamics of the attached turbulent cavitating flows, a filter-based model (FBM) is derived from the k-E > two-equation model, a conditional averaging method aimed at improving unsteady simulation is applied to computation. In comparison to the standard k-E > model, overall, the filter-based model is shown to improve the predictive capability considerably.