Study of Available Turbulence and Cavitation Models to Reproduce Flow Patterns in Confined Flows

Abstract

Cavitating flow in nozzles is a complex flow which implies a highly turbulent twophase one. An accurate simulation which improves some numerical results found in the literature was achieved by means of an extensive analysis of the capabilities of several numerical models for turbulence and cavitation. The analysis performed involves calibration/optimization tasks based on the physics of this kind of flow. This work aims to provide a quantitative criterion for the judgment of internal flow state, because it was demonstrated that the numerical results obtained with noncalibrated models could be enhanced by means of a careful calibration and thus saving computational costs.