Cavitation modeling for steady-state CFD simulations

Cavitation in hydraulic turbomachines is an important phenomenon to be considered for performance predictions. Correct analysis of the cavitation onset and its effect on the flow field while diminishing the pressure level need therefore to be investigated. Even if cavitation often appears as an unsteady phenomenon, the capability to compute it in a steady state formulation for the design and assessment phase in the product development process is very useful for the engineer. In the present paper the development and corresponding application of a steady state CFD solver is presented, based on the open source toolbox OpenFOAM®. In the first part a review of different cavitation models is presented. Adopting the mixture-type cavitation approach, various models are investigated and developed in a steady state CFD RANS solver. Particular attention is given to the coupling between cavitation and turbulence models as well as on the underlying numerical procedure, especially the integration in the pressure- correction step of pressure-based solvers, which plays an important role in the stability of the procedure. The performance of the proposed model is initially assessed on simple cases available in the open literature. In a second step results for different applications are presented, ranging from airfoils to pumps.