An experimental study on characteristics of cavitation and ballistic of axisymmetric slender body underwater movement

An experimental study of the axisymmetric slender body underwater movement was conducted using high-speed photography technology. From the results of the experiment, the characteristics of cavitation and ballistic of the axisymmetric, including the formation, development, evolution and collapse of the cavity, are presented in the paper. The experimental results show that the axisymmetric slender body moves in a supercavity, and the slender body rotate in the supercavity on its head at the same time due to the perturbation of launching. The supercavity wall is transparent and smooth except the tail itself. The impact between the tail of slender body and supercavity wall resulted from the slender body's rotation is termed as tailslap which is one way to keep the stabilization of the movement. Series of different flow mechanisms and the relationship between ballistic characteristics and cavity characteristics with defferent initial velocities are discussed. The slender bodies have different accelerations and ballistics with different initial velocity which means they have different drag forces.