LES of Partial Cavitation Around a 2D Plane-Convex Hydrofoil Large Eddy Simulation of Partial Cavitation Around a 2D Plane-Convex Hydrofoil

Investigations of attached partial cavitation are important because to prevent damages in hydrulic machinery and to reduce the costs. As expected computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods have been developed for more than 40 years to understand this phenomenon and to improve the machinery designs, as pumps and hydraulic turbines. However, cavitation appears at high Reynolds numbers, so that, the traditional turbulence models Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) k− e and k−ω are not able to capture the bubbles motion. Therefore, large eddy simulation with implicit (ILES) and explicit (ELES) turbulence methods have been used to capture and study partial cavitation around a plane-convex hydrofoil. The CFD simulation has been carried out by the free open source software OpenFOAM and python language for data analysis. The research shows that ELES and ILES give results similar to experiments from the cavitation tunnel of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).