Characteristics of cavitating flow of liquid hydrogen in inducer

A revised Kubota cavitation model to consider the thermal effect and the SST k-ω two-equation turbulence model were applied into the simulation of cavitating flows of liquid hydrogen and water in an inducer to study its cavitation characteristics. Not only the cavitating flows in the inducer under different cavitation conditions with those fluids were numerically predicted, but also the power and cavitation performances were analyzed. It was found that the revised Kubota cavitation model can simulate the liquid hydrogen cavitating flows very well, and a good agreement was achieved between the numerical results and experiment data. Compared with water, the inducer head with liquid hydrogen is higher, and the critical cavitation number and cavity size are smaller. This is due to the diffe-rence in physical properties of two fluids, especially the influence of their thermal effect. Cavitation performance of inducer is obviously improved and its incipient cavitation number is decreased when li-quid hydrogen is used as the working fluid compared with water.