Cavitation of Multiscale Vortices in Circular Cylinder Wake at Re = 9500
Fadong Gu, Yadong Huang, Desheng Zhang
Abstract
Cavitation characteristics in the wake of a circular cylinder, which contains multiscale vortices, are numerically investigated via Large Eddy Simulation (LES) in this paper. The Reynolds number is 9500 based on the inlet velocity, the cylinder diameter and the kinematic viscosity of the noncavitation liquid. The Schneer–Sauer (SS) model is applied to cavitation simulation because it is more sensitive to vapor–liquid two-phase volume fraction than the Zwart–Gerber–Belamri (ZGB) model, according to theoretical analyses. The wake is quasiperiodic, with an approximate frequency of 0.2. It is found that the cavitation of vortices could inhibit the vortex shedding. Besides, the mutual aggregation of small-scale vortices in the vortex system or the continuous stripping of small-scale vortices at the edge of large-scale vortices could induce the merging or splitting of cavities in the wake.