A method for quantitatively depicting the influence of vortices on the pressure forces acting on a hydrofoil in cavitating flow with tip clearance

Abstract

In this paper, the force decomposition method (FDM) is proposed for decomposing the pressure forces acting on the immersed body. The major improvement in FDM is the applicability in RANS and LES simulations with non-constant density flows, e.g. cavitating flow. In the single-phase flow over a circular cylinder (Re = 3900), the FDM results show excellent agreement with the pressure force given by conventional method. In the cavitating flow over a hydrofoil with tip clearance, FDM can also reproduce the same tendency of the pressure force with an average deviation below 17%. In this case, the vorticity and kinematic effect induced force dominates the pressure force. In order to isolate the effect of attached cavitation near the suction side and tip clearance cavitation, a method combing domain cutting (manually) and cell extracting (by a threshold of vorticity magnitude) is proposed. The lift caused by vorticity force is mainly affected by the vortices shedding from the suction side of the hydrofoil. Also, the tip clearance region should not be ignored, where the lift generation by TLV is the interaction of strong shear and rotating flows.