Isothermal compressible flow solver for prediction of cavitation erosion

Abstract

Cavitation erosion can be observed on hydraulic mechanical devices and has long been studied as a challenging research topic. In this paper, a practical method to predict cavitation erosion was developed. To simulate cavitating flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), an isothermal compressible cavitating flow solver was developed using the OpenFOAM toolkit. A cavitation erosion coefficient was proposed as a function of the cavitation and Reynolds numbers. From the simulations, the cavitation erosion coefficients were calculated using metamodeling methods. Finally, the developed practical method of cavitation erosion was applied to a marine propeller. As observed in experiments, cavitation erosion was predicted near the propeller tip.