Experimental investigation of the flow-induced vibration of hydrofoils in cavitating flows

The objective of this paper is to investigate the correlation between fluid induced vibration and unsteady cavitation behaviours. Experimental results are presented for a modified NACA66 hydrofoil, which is fixed at α=8°. The high-speed camera is synchronized with a single point Laser Doppler Vibrometer to analyze the transient cavitating flow structures and the corresponding structural vibration characteristics. The results showed that, with the decreasing of the cavitation number, the cavitating flows in a water tunnel display several types of cavitation patterns, such as incipient cavitation, sheet cavitation and cloud cavitation. The cavity shedding frequency reduces with the decrease of the cavitation number. As for the cloud cavitation regime, the trend of the vibration velocity goes up with the growth of the attached cavity, accompanied with small amplitude fluctuations. Then the collapse and shedding of the large-scale cloud cavities leads to substantial increase of the vibration velocity fluctuations.