STATE-OF-THE ART IN COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CAVITATION INCEPTION AND ITS SCALE EFFECTS

Mathematical analysis of cavitation inception is an important topic for naval engineering, but several circumstances make it difficult. First, cavitating flows are substantially multi-zone flows, where the appearing cavities are incomparably smaller than a cavitating body is. Second, inception is substantially influenced by characteristics of the inflow and of the body surfaces. Third, validation of employed mathematical methods by comparison with experimental data is a non-trivial task because of the complexity of experiments themselves and scale effects. This paper is emphasized on multi-zone quasi-steady approaches for prediction of cavitation inception and desinence numbers. The obtained computational results are compared with the known experimental data for sheet cavitation, vortex cavitation and cavitation behind surface irregularities. Procedures of scaling of cavitation inception number and the eventual combinations of various CFD solvers are also discussed.