Cavitation Evolution Around a Twist Hydrofoil by Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with Mesh Adaption

The cavitating flow around a Delft Twist-11 hydrofoil is simulated using the large eddy simulation approach. The volume-of-fluid method incorporated with the Schnerr–Sauer cavitation model is utilized to track the water–vapor interface. Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is also applied to improve the simulation accuracy automatically. Two refinement levels are conducted to verify the dominance of AMR in predicting cavitating flows. Results show that cavitation features, including the U-type structure of shedding clouds, are consistent with experimental observations. Even a coarse mesh can precisely capture the phase field without increasing the total cell number significantly using mesh adaption. The predicted shedding frequency agrees fairly well with the experimental data under refinement level 2. This study illustrates that AMR is a promising approach to achieve accurate simulations for multiscale cavitating flows within limited computational costs. Finally, the force element method is currently adopted to investigate the lift and drag fluctuations during the evolution of cavitation structure. The mechanisms of lift and drag fluctuations due to cavitation and the interaction between vorticity forces and cavitation are explicitly revealed.