Computational Study of Unsteady Cavitating Flow on 3D NACA4412 Hydrofoil

This research focuses on the performance of the 3D unsteady cavitating flow over NACA4412 hydrofoil at angle of attack 40 in the range of super cavitation to non-cavitation zone. The range of cavitation numbers considered from 0.3 to 1.1. The simulation has been carried out in commercial software ANSYS Fluent. Zwart–Gerber–Belamri (ZGB) cavitation model along with Realizable κ–ϵ turbulence model has been utilized for the computation. To analyze the hydrodynamic performance, the lift coefficient, drag coefficient, coefficient of pressure, Strouhal number is computed at various cavitation numbers. It has been found that hydrodynamic performance parameters of hydrofoil are associated with cavitating conditions. For angle of attack 40 moving from super cavitation zone (σ = 0.3) to non-cavitation zone (σ = 1.1), the lift coefficient nonlinearly grows (from 0.2 to 0.8), and cavitation length reduces.