Dynamics of unsteady compressible cavitating flows associated with the cavity shedding

The main purpose of this work is to shed light on the physics involved in the two distinct cavity cloud shedding mechanisms in cloud cavitating flows, namely re-entrant jet mechanism (RJM) and shock wave propagation mechanism (SWM). A compressible cavitating flow solver, which considers the compressibility effects of both liquid and vapor, is used to account for the wave dynamics in cavitating flows. The compressible Navier-Stokes equations, coupling the mass, momentum energy equations, and phase fraction transport equation, along with the thermodynamic equations of state for both liquid and vapor, Saito cavitation model and the SST-SAS turbulence model, are solved. Numerical results are presented for the conditions of both the re-entrant jet mechanism and shock wave mechanism around a NACA66 (mod) hydrofoil (Leroux et al., 2005), respectively, with emphasis on the process of re-entrant jet development and shock wave formation and propagation. The results show that the re-entrant jet can cause the attached cavity sheet breakup for both the two cavity cloud shedding mechanisms in both high and low angle of attack, while the shock wave formation and propagation process only occurs under shock wave mechanism at low angles of attack. Pressure evolution illustrates that in the re-entrant jet mechanism, cavity cloud collapse will induce high pressure load, while no shock wave and thus the corresponding rebound phenomenon are observed. In shock wave mechanism, during the whole process of the shock wave dynamics, namely generation, propagation and rebound process, pressure fluctuations increase sharply along with the generation of the pressure peaks with large amplitude and short time interval. Further study on the compressible characteristics involved in the two cavity shedding mechanisms illustrates that vapor fraction and mass transfer have a significant effect in sonic speed and Mach number characteristics. The average and standard derivation of maximum Mach number (Ma_max) in shock wave mechanism is lower than that in re-entrant jet mechanism. Cavitating flows are characterized by low sonic speed value in the cavitation region and high sonic speed value in the pure liquid region and a sonic speed boundary layer exists between the two regions, the thickness of which is about the size of the local attached cavity sheet on foil surface. In the process of shock wave generation and rebound, cavity volume and cavity volume rate experience large fluctuations, showing strong cavitation instabilities in shock wave mechanism.