Study of tip vortex cavitation inception and vortex singing

• Published in: Journal of hydrodynamics. Series B Vol. 31; no. 6; pp. 1170 - 1177
• Main Authors: Peng, Xiao-xing, Zhang, Ling-xin, Wang, Ben-long, Xu, Liang-hao, Song, Ming-tai, Cao, Yan-tao, Liu, Yu-wen, Hong, Fang-wen, Yan, Kai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer Singapore 01.12.2019
• Subjects: Engineering; Engineering Fluid Dynamics; Hydrology/Water Resources; Numerical and Computational Physics; Simulation; Special Column on 30th NCHD; cavitation inception; noise; flow field; water quality; Tip vortex cavitation
• ISSN: 1001-6058; 1878-0342
• DOI: 10.1007/s42241-019-0091-4

Tip vortex cavitation (TVC) is an important cavitation phenomenon in marine propeller. The formation and evolution of tip vortex cavitation are hot topics consistently both in engineering application and mechanism research. In this paper some recent studies on tip vortex cavitation inception and the noise of tip vortex cavitation evolution are presented. The effects of both flow field and water qualities on tip vortex cavitation inception are considered by experiments and numerical simulations. The results show that besides the average minimum pressure in the vortex core the turbulence fluctuation and water qualities including air content and nuclei distribution have great influence on tip vortex cavitation inception. Based on the idea of first nucleus cavitating in tip vortex core new prediction formula for tip vortex cavitation inception is proposed. The synchronous technique of high speed video observation and noise measurement are adopted to study the development of tip vortex cavitation. S-type total noise characteristics are obtained when cavitation number from low to high. Vortex singing is found in the case where the tip vortex cavitation just before leaves the tip region. The excited mechanism of vortex singing is proposed by analyzing the wave propagation on the interface of vortex cavity.