Large eddy simulation of cavitation development on highly skewed propellers

This paper deals with numerical simulations of the cavitating flow around two highly skewed propellers operating in open water and mounted on an inclined shaft. The aim of the study is to check the ability of our numerical method in distinguishing the variation in flow features resulting from different blade designs. Moreover, a secondary aim is also to improve the knowledge about the physics that control the growth and collapse of cavitation, and hence also the generation of cavitation noise and erosion on this type of propellers. The investigation is based on incompressible large eddy simulation (LES) in combination with a volume-of-fluid implementation to represent the two phases of liquid and vapour, and a transport equation-based method for the mass transfer between the phases. High-speed video recordings from experiments were made available for comparison. The simulations demonstrate that the current method makes it possible to analyse the main difference in flow features caused by modest design alternation. Furthermore, with suitable grid resolution, LES is demonstrated to be capable of capturing the mechanisms that are important in the cavitation development, and that numerical simulation is a reliable supplement to experiments in advanced propeller design.