A Numerical Treatment for Attached Cavitation

Abstract

A new numerical treatment has been developed for the prediction of the flowfield resulting from an attached cavitation region. The cavitation model has been implemented in a viscous calculation which is an improvement over previous inviscid results. The model requires no apriori knowledge of the wall detachment point or bubble length and comparisons with experimental data indicate good predictions of these quantities for a variety of different body shapes and cavitation numbers. Furthermore, wall pressure distributions are also predicted quite accurately using this method. While the treatment has been applied to an axisymmetric calculation, the approach should be applicable to two-dimensional flows.