Flow pattern regime and unsteady characteristics of ventilated cavitating flow around the axisymmetric bodies with different headforms

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the flow pattern regime and unsteady characteristics of ventilated cavities with different headform shapes. The test model consists of a removable headform with three different forebodies (the conical, the blunt, and the hemispherical) and a common cylinder rear body. Experiments are conducted in a closed-loop cavitation tunnel. First, the flow pattern regimes on the ventilated cavity for different headforms are discussed in detail, and the dimensions of several flow patterns are measured. The results show that the cavity dimension and the regime are strongly dependent on the headform shape, and all typical flow patterns are introduced by schematic illustrations. Second, the ventilation hysteresis that happened during the flow pattern transition is pointed out. A quantitative gas leakage model is employed to explain the cause of hysteresis and flow pattern transition, and the results show the Strouhal number for different headforms is approximately ∼0.21. However, the blunt presented stronger gas leakage with a large constant parameter, K = 0.80. Finally, the unsteady characteristics of the ventilated cavity around different tested headforms are involved through descriptions of developments of the recirculating vortex and transparent cavity. In addition, an estimated cavitation number is applied to investigate the unsteady characteristics, and the maximum cavitation number and the strongest characteristic are obtained by the blunt headform due to the large drag coefficient and strong flow separation.