Numerical Study on the Unsteady Characteristics of the Propeller Cavitation in Uniform and Nonuniform Wake Flows

Propeller cavitation is a problematic issue because of its negative effects, such as performances losses, noise, vibration and erosion. Numerical methodology is an effective and efficient technical tool for the study of propeller cavitation, however, it is hard to capture tip-vortex cavitation in the previous work by using common turbulence models based on turbulent-viscosity hypothesis. In this work, the Reynolds-Averaged Naiver-Stokes (RANS) approach, adopting the Reynolds stress turbulence model (RSM), is taken to study the unsteady characteristics of the cavitation on the four-bladed INSEAN E779A model propeller. The numerical simulation was carried out using the commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent 14.0. One kind of uniform wake flow and two kinds of nonuniform wake flows are considered here. The results in the uniform flow show a good agreement with previous experimental results on both the sheet cavitation and the tip vortex cavitation and prove the ability of the RSM on capturing the tip vortex cavitation. Two kinds of nonuniform wake flows are designed based on the previous experimental researches and the unsteady characteristics of the propeller cavitation are analyzed by comparing the results in the uniform and two nonuniform wake flows together.