Experimental and numerical analysis on vortex cavitation morphological characteristics in u-shape notch spool valve and the vortex cavitation coupled choked flow conditions

The u-shape notch of spool valve is usually combined with the other typical throttling notches to achieve proportional flowrate adjustments in practical hydraulic control applications. Due to the vacuum-suction nozzle-structural effect, u-shape notch is more likely for cavitation arising. Traditionally, notch throttling is based on the continuity and Bernoulli equation to explain the Harvey nuclei bubble flow from development to collapse, which is not entirely agreed with present proliferated large vapor vortex cavitation researches. In this paper, experimental and numerical analysis discuss the morphological characteristics of u-shape notch vortex cavitation and the choked flow issues caused by vortex cavitation. The large vapor vortex cavitation morphological reproduced by the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model associated with the multi-phase cavitation model is very close to experimental observations. Further, based on the clear cavity entity obtained by simulation, it could be found that, as notch opening increases, the cavity starting position moves back and the cavity moves upward. And as pressure difference increases, the cavity length increases smoothly until critical pressure value, after which the length increases sharply and maintains in long length level. In addition, it seems that the normalized measurement manner of cavitation length could be proposed, if using local cavitation number dividing incipient cavitation as abscissa to measure the cavity length. Moreover, the cavitating flowrate equation is proposed considering the cavitation-induced serious choked flow problem. The vortex cavitation, especially its length, is assumed to represent intense enough notch vortex flow friction loss. Based on the added flow loss term, the classical flowrate equation is revised, according to which the cavitating flowrate could be predicted within the accuracy of 0.5-2.0%. (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.