Numerical Study on Flow-Induced Vibration Characteristics of Three-Dimensional Hydrofoil in Cavitating Flow

Abstract

With the increasing demand of higher performance and efficiencies for marine propulsion and hydropower system, structures became more flexible and were subjected to high flow rates. Cavitation-structure interaction has become one of the major issues for most engineering applications. In order to analyze the characteristics of unsteady cavitating flow induced vibration, the cloud cavitation flow over three dimensional NACA66 hydrofoil is studied by numerical simulation in this paper. The cavitating flow is modeled by large eddy simulation method and Zwart cavitation model, and the structural vibration model of three dimensional hydrofoil is established. The numerical calculation of fluid-solid coupling is realized based on ANSYS Workbench. The main dimensionless parameters of three-dimensional hydrofoil cavitation flow-induced vibration are obtained by means of dimensional analysis, including density ratio, cavitation number, Reynolds number, and the frequency ratio of flow to structure. The changes of cavity morphology during the cloud cavitation development of flexible hydrofoil and the flow-induced vibration characteristics under cloud cavitation flow of flexible hydrofoil are analyzed. The results showed that the periodic development of cavitation can be divided into three stages: the growth of attached cavity, the development of re-entrant jet and the shedding of cavity in cloud cavitaion stage. The centroid displacement of the free end of the flexible hydrofoil varies periodically with time at the stage of cloud cavitation. The hydrofoil vibration is affected by the development of cloud cavitation, and the vibration frequency corresponds to the shedding frequency of cloud cavitation.