Simulation of cavitation and surface erosion on marine propellers

Cavitation is the formation of vapor pockets in a liquid due to a pressure drop or an increase in speed. Cavitation nuisance can be disastrous for mechanical components, and therefore needs to be controlled from an early design stage. However, predicting cavitation dynamics using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and therefore the performance...

Cavitation erosion risk assessment on a full-scale steerable thruster

Propeller cavitation erosion prediction at an early design stage is becoming more and more important since it is one of the key constraints in the search for maximum propeller efficiency. Despite the experience from model tests, cavitation erosion research on actual ship scale is very limited. In this study, an attempt is made to assess the...

Experimental investigation of cavitation-induced erosion around a surface-mounted bluff body

The objective of this study is to investigate the collapsing behavior of cavitation, which leads to the erosion of material. An experimental examination was conducted in a channel with a semi-circular cylinder obstacle, which serves as a “vortex cavity” generator. Cavitation was achieved by employing a range of pressure differences over the...

Cavitation implosion loads from energy balance considerations in numerical flow simulations

Cavitation erosion is a problem in the design of a wide range of fluid machinery involving liquid flows. Ship propellers, rudders, hydro pumps and turbines or diesel injectors are some of the most prominent examples. Cavitation occurs at locations of high local flow velocity, where the pressure may drop so low that the liquid phase vaporizes....

On the accuracy of predicting cavitation impact loads on marine propellers

Predicting the cavitation impact loads on a propeller surface using numerical tools is becoming essential, as the demand for more efficient designs, stretched to the limit, is increasing. One of the possible design limits is governed by cavitation erosion. The accuracy of estimating such loads, using a URANS approach, has been investigated....

Experimental study of cavitation erosion around a surface mounted semi circular cylinder

The objective of this study is to investigate the collapsing behavior of cavitation, which leads to erosion. For this purpose, an experimental investigation was performed in a channel with a semi-circular cylinder obstacle at the Hydraulic Laboratory of ANDRITZ HYDRO in Vevey. Cavitation was achieved by employing a range of pressure differences...

An energy conservative method to predict the erosive aggressiveness of collapsing cavitating structures and cavitating flows from numerical simulations

A new technique is proposed in this study to assess the erosive aggressiveness of cavitating flows from numerical flow simulations. The technique is based on the cavitation intensity approach by Leclercq et al. (2017), predicting the instantaneous surface impact power of collapsing cavities from the potential energy hypothesis (see Hammitt,...

Erosive aggressiveness of collapsing cavitating structures

The erosive aggressiveness of idealized cavities collapsing on a flat surface is investigated by numerical simulation, employing the cavitation intensity approach by Leclercq et al (2017) as a measure of the local energy impact rate. We propose a more straight forward formulation of the cavitation intensity model and verify that it satisfies...

Assessment of Cavitation Erosion with a Multiphase Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Method

Cavitation erosion is one of the remarkable catastrophic consequences of cavitation. Predicting the cavitation aggressiveness quantitatively and predicting the most probable location of cavitation erosion are complex problems that currently still motivate an important amount of basic and applied research in the fields of hydrodynamics, physics...