Numerical investigations of the transient cavitating vortical flow structures over a flexible NACA66 hydrofoil

In this paper,the cavitating flow over a flexible NACA66 hydrofoil is studied numerically by a modified fluid-structure interaction strategy with particular emphasis on understanding the flow-induced vibration and the cavitating vortical flow structures.The modified coupling approaches include(1)the hydrodynamic solution obtained by the large eddy simulation(LES)together with a homogenous cavitation model,(2)the structural deformation solved with a cantilever beam equation,(3)fluid-structural interpolation and volume mesh motion based on the radial basis functions and greedy algorithm.For the flexible hydrofoil,the dominant flow-induced vibration frequency is twice of the cavity shedding frequency.The cavity shedding frequency is same for the rigid and flexible hydrofoils,demonstrating that the structure vibration is not large enough to affect the cavitation evolution.The predicted cavitating behaviors are strongly three-dimensional,that is,the cavity is(a)of a triangular shape near the hydrofoil tip,(b)of a rectangular shape near the hydrofoil root,and(c)with a strong unsteadiness in the middle of the span,including the attached cavity growth,oscillation and shrinkage,break-off and collapse downstream.The unsteady hydroelastic response would strongly affect the cavitation shedding process with small-scale fragments at the cavity rear part.Furthermore,three vortex identification methods(i.e.,the vorticity,the Q-criteria and the Ω method)are adopted to investigate the cavitating vortex structures around the flexible hydrofoil.It is indicated that the cavity variation trend is consistent with the vortex evolution.The vortex structures are distributed near the foil trailing edge and in the cavitation region,especially at the cavity-liquid interface.With the transporting downstream the shedding cavities,the vortices gradually increase in the wake flows.

Numerical study on influence of structural vibration on cavitating flow around axisymmetric slender body

The unsteady behaviors of cloud cavitating flow would lead to structural vibration and deformation that conversely affect its development. The present paper aims to preliminarily discuss the influences of structural vibration on the development of the cavitating flow. Simulations of a slender body are carried out under different vibration amplitudes and frequencies. The results show that the structural vibration causes alternate variation of local attack angle at the head of the body, and thus changes the development of cavitation and re-entrant jet. On the downstream side, the length and thickness of the cavity are larger than that on the upstream side due to larger area of negative pressure. For a large vibration amplitude, alternate variations of the local attack angle change the adverse pressure gradient at the closure of the cavity, and then affect the development of the re-entrant jet, so that the phenomena of local shedding of the cavitation happen, compared with global shedding in the case of no structural vibration. For a frequency larger than 0.05, transverse speed of the vibration is suggested to be a dominant factor in controlling the behavior of the cavitating flow besides the local attack angle, since it causes local cavitating phenomena.