Numerical Simulation of Cavitation for Comparison of Sodium and Water Flows

In this paper, numerical simulation of cavitation for water and sodium flows were performed by using CFD code package FLUENT and the results were compared with the experiments. The geometry of the grid for numerical calculation was a venturi with ID and OD of 6.5 and 21 mm, respectively. The numerical simulations showed that the onset cavitation conditions were affected significantly by the non-condensable gas content in the liquid. Comparing with the experimental results, the non-condensable gas contents that gave close predictions of onset cavitation conditions with the experiments were larger in water than in liquid sodium because of the different solubility property of air and argon gas. Parametrical analysis showed that the void fraction distributions for water and liquid sodium did not show large differences in case of the same caviation coefficient and non-condensable gas contents.