Physical and numerical investigation of the flow induced vibration of the hydrofoil

The objective of this paper is to investigate the flow induced vibration of a flexible hydrofoil in cavitating flows via combined experimental and numerical studies. The experiments are presented for the modified NACA66 hydrofoil made of POM Polyacetate in the closed-loop cavitation tunnel at Beijing Institute of Technology. The high-speed camera and the single point Laser Doppler Vibrometer are applied to analyze the transient flow structures and the corresponding structural vibration characteristics. The hybrid coupled fluid structure interaction model is conducted to couple the incompressible and unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes solver with a simplified two-degree-of-freedom structural model. The k-ω SST turbulence model with the turbulence viscosity correction and the Zwart cavitation model are introduced to the present simulations. The results showed that with the decreasing of the cavitation number, the cavitating flows display incipient cavitation, sheet cavitation, cloud cavitation and supercavitation. The vibration magnitude increases dramatically for the cloud cavitation and decline for the supercavitation. The cloud cavitation development strongly affects the vibration response, which is corresponding to the periodically developing and shedding of the large-scale cloud cavity. The main frequency of the vibration amplitude is accordance with the cavity shedding frequency and other two frequencies of the vibration amplitude are corresponding to the natural frequencies of the bending and twisting modes.