Evaluation of the mass transport models in computations of cavitating flows with thermal effects

The numerical simulation on liquid nitrogen cavitating flows around a 2D quarter caliber hydrofoil with thermal effect is conducted. In the simulation, four different Merkle, Kunz, Kubota and Singhal mass transport models and variable thermodynamic properties of the fluid are implemented to commercial software CFX via a UDF (user defined function) which is compiled and linked to the solver. Numerical results obtained are compared with the experimental ones. It is revealed that the numerical results, especially the influence of the thermal effect, have some distinctive because of different physical mechanism of the four mass transport models. The pressure and temperature distributions obtained based on Merkle cavitation model are the nearest results compared with the experimental data. The process of mass transport can reflect the influence of temperature variation well. The distinctions between the numerical and experimental results are different obviously when the Singhal cavitaion model is used, and the model can not describe the temperature distribution very well.