Numerical investigation of flow around cavitating hydrofoil using finite volume method

Cavitation has attracted much attention due to its frequent occurrence in a wide range of fluid machinery applications such as pumps, hydraulic turbines, ship propellers, rudders etc. and its significant influence on the performance reduction and the creation of noise, vibrations and surface erosion. Cavitating flow around NACA 0021 and NACA 0012 hydrofoil for different cavitation numbers and angle of attacks has been investigated in this research. Finite Volume Method (FVM) based on Reynolds’s Averaged Navies-Stokes Equations (RANSE) is used for simulating the flow. A commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS FLUENT has been used to implement the method. To analyze turbulent flow, k-ε turbulence model has been adopted. Mixture model has been applied for the modeling of multiphase flow of air and water. The effect on cavitation has been studied at different angles of attack keeping the cavitation number fixed. Then the effect on cavitation has been examined for different cavitation numbers keeping the angle of attack fixed. The computed results have been validated with experimental/theoretical results of other researchers. It is expected that the outcome of this research will be useful for engineers to design hydrofoil boat, ship propeller, rudder etc.