Numerical Analysis of Cavitation Inception and Desinence Behind Orifices

Abstract

Experimental results and trends for cavitation inception and desinence behind orifices in microchannels are quite different from the data obtained during previous experiments in much larger facilities. The objective of this paper is to explain these differences via a numerical analysis. The employed computational procedure is divided into two parts. The first part is computation of an axisymmetric separated flow around the orifice. The second part is determination of characteristics of cavities appearing within separation zones. The provided analysis of the experimental data of other researchers pointed out two sources of the above-mentioned differences. First, for larger orifices, the cavities appear in the cores of drifting vortices. For such a situation, cavitation inception and desinence number increases with the inflow speed due to an impact of turbulence, but there is no such an increase for microbubbles with laminar flows. Second, because of the difficulty to measure the cavity pressure in microbubbles, cavitation number is usually defined with employment of the vapor pressure, and this leads to misinterpretation of the measurements and their trends.