Comparison of Different Physical Models for the Simulation of Cavitating Flows Around a Hydrofoil

The simulation of cavitating flow is a difficult task, due to the large density ratio between liquid and vapor phases. Investigation of currently known cavitation and turbulence models and their mutual interaction can be a significant asset to improving their performance. Several previous works present results on cavitating flows obtained by various physical models, that mainly differ by the treatment of the mass transfer calculation between vapor and liquid phases. In this study different cavitation models have been implemented in a commercial, general-purpose CFD code (Fluent), and numerical results were compared to experimental ones. Different turbulence models have been also compared, in particularly, to improve numerical simulations by taking into account the influence of the compressibility of two-phase medium on turbulence, a modified k-ε RNG model and compared with the standard model. The simulations were carried out on 2D hydrofoil with an Eppler E817 cross section. The inception cavitation number, the cavity length and the pressure coefficients have been compared with the experimental data.