A modified density based cavitation model for time dependent turbulent cavitating flow computations

The predictive capability of transport equation-based cavitation models including the Kubota cavitation model (Model-1) and interfacial dynamics cavitation model (Model-2), is evaluated for the attached turbulent cavitating flows. In this study, the test problem is the unsteady cloud cavitating flows around a Clark-Y hydrofoil. Based on the evaluations of existing models, we identified the differences between these two vaporization and condensation processes in the affected region, and provided a modified density based cavitation model (Model-3). The numerical results of the cavity shapes, velocity distributions and dynamics of the cavity oscillations were compared to existing experimental data. Compared with the other cavitation models, a significant improvement for the numerical results of unsteady cavitating flows has been obtained with the new model. Our study provides the information for further modeling development.