High-fidelity numerical simulation of unsteady cavitating flow around a hydrofoil

Cavitation is a widespread and detrimental phenomenon in hydraulic machinery, therefore, it requires to be accurately predicted. In this study, large eddy simulation (LES), scale-adaptive simulation (SAS) and grid-adaptive simulation (GAS) are employed to investigate the unsteady cavitating flow around a NACA0009 hydrofoil. The prediction accuracy of GAS, SAS, both using the shear-stress transport (SST) k — ω model as baseline turbulence model, is validated by comparing with experimental and LES results. The cavity behaviors and turbulence fields are analyzed systematically. Results show that the GAS gives a more reasonable turbulent viscosity and accurately predicts the periodic evolution of typical vortical structures of cavitating flow, such as tip leakage vortex cavitation, tip separation vortex cavitation, leading-edge cavitation, and trailing-edge vortex. The time-averaged cavity volume, volume fluctuation amplitude, and characteristic frequencies of cavities predicted by the GAS are very closed to the LES, while the SAS fails to accurately capture these cavity characteristics. Furthermore, the local trace criterion is applied to extract the vortical structures and to analyze the swirling patterns of the tip leakage vortex. Multi-scale vortical structures in LES are well identified by local trace criterion. The prediction accuracy of the SAS method for small-scale vortical structures, such as the vortex shedding on the suction side and the vortex rope around the tip leakage vortex, is obviously insufficient, while the GAS has a higher accuracy in predicting vortex shedding. The tip leakage vortex and induced vortex extracted from GAS are also closer to that of LES in both swirling patterns and scale.