UNSTEADY CAVITATION SIMULATION IN TRANSIENT PROCESS OF TURBINE FLOW METER

In a turbine flow meter, cavitation will take place when local pressure falls below the vapor pressure of liquid products and it usually speeds up the rotor at the given high flow rate. In order to study its effects on meter factor, numerical simulation on transient unsteady turbulent flow is carried out based on the mixture homogeneous two phase cavitation model which is deduced from the theory of evaporation and condensation on a plane. The momentum source terms from the variation rotating speed of transient processes and the cavitation mass transport source terms are introduced into the transient unsteady governing equations. The results show that the meter factor grows with the increase of the cavitation number and meter factor will be affected by cavitation.