Modeling of the impact of laminar-turbulent transition on cavitation inception

The main incentive to study cavitation inception has been the accompanying jump of flow-induced noise. The water tunnel tests of cavitation inception have been carried out at Reynolds numbers that are substantially smaller than those which occurs to most of the marine applications. As a result, there are significant scale effects. Employment of trips to enhance laminar-turbulent transition in boundary layers of tested models may seem to be useful to reduce these effects, but the experiment of Arakeri and Acosta showed that the trip use can lead to the trend opposite to the trends observed in flows with the natural transition. This paper gives the theoretical explanation of the difference of trends. The explanation is obtained via computations based on a viscous-inviscid interaction procedure with employing a multi-zone flow model. The viscous part of the flow includes attached boundary layers and viscous separation zones. Possibilities of laminar-turbulent transitions and relaminarization are taken into account, as well as capillarity effect on the surfaces of cavities.