Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference
Shanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

Numerical study on the effect of relative camber on hydrofoil cavitation
Yang-Fan Xu1, Han-Bing Sun1,*, Qing-Wei Ma2, and Shi-Qiang Yan2
1. College of Shipbuilding Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, China
2. Schools of Engineering and Mathematical Science, City University, UK

spatial mobility and violent non-stationarity usually cause serious loss ofhydrodynamic performance, accompanied by adverse effects such as
material corrosion, noise radiation, vibration excitation and so on.

ABSTRACT
Cavitation is a complex hydrodynamic phase transition phenomenon
occurring in the low-pressure region of liquid, the interface between
liquid and steam is fuzzy and requires high mesh resolution. Based on
STAR-CCM+, this paper uses adaptive mesh refinement to simulate andanalyze NACA 66 pseudo-2D hydrofoil, and verifies the feasibility ofthe mesh scheme with the numerical results and experimental values.
Then, taking hydrofoil with same relative thickness and different relative
camber as the research object, the hydrodynamic performance andcavitation characteristics of hydrofoil with different relative camber
under different cavitation numbers are studied by using adaptive meshrefinement. The simulation results show that the adaptive mesh is refinedaccording to the set field function, which can effectively reduce thenumber of meshes and provide enough mesh resolution to capture thelocal details of cavitation. With the increase of relative camber, thelonger the cavitation length is, the higher the lift-drag ratio is. The ratioof lift-drag ratio to cavitation length is used as the evaluation standard ofhydrofoil performance. It is found that the performance of hydrofoil
increases at first and then decreases with the increase of relative camberin steady cavitation shape. When the cavitation shedding area is therolling and shedding of the large structure at the tail, the performance ofhydrofoil is negatively correlated with relative camber as a whole. Whenthe cavitation shedding area is behind the hydrofoil trailing edge,
different relative camber has little effect on the overall performance ofhydrofoil.

At present, the technology of simulating cavitation morphology andevolution process by CFD has entered a period of rapid development. In
the process of numerical simulation, not only the turbulence problem isdiscussed, but also the critical phase transition process needs to be dealt
with. Ji et al. (2019) mainly focused on attached cavitation, taking into
account cloud cavitation, cavitation erosion, vortex cavitation and otherphenomenon, and summarized the achievements and problems to besolved in unsteady cavitation research in recent years. Reisman et al.
(1998) and Laberteaux et al. (2001) pointed out that there are different
cavitation topological structures in cavitation flow, including sheet
cavitation, cloud cavitation and vortex cavitation. With the deepening ofhydrofoil cavitation research, it is found that for the numerical simulationof unsteady cavitation shedding, the traditional static mesh scheme needs
to be continuously refined to capture the local details of cavitation. In
order to capture the cavitation behind and beyond the hydrofoil trailingedge, the increase of the refinement region can only be relied on. In 2019,
Yilmaz et al., in the numerical simulation of propeller tip vortex
cavitation in INSEANE779A model, firstly used static mesh scheme torefine the propeller blade tip, and the total number of meshes has reachedabout 17 million. However, due to the insufficient physical resolution ofmesh in the flow field behind the propeller, the existing methods still
could not fully simulate the tip vortex cavitation.
Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a powerful tool for allocating highresolution meshes to the most concerned regions. Refinement occurs
only in the interface regions, and high-precision simulation can beachieved with limited computing resources. Therefore, AMR shows
great promise in the study of cavitation problems. Liu (2021) simulated
the propeller cavitation by using static mesh scheme and AMR
respectively, which verified the effectiveness of the adaptive refinementtechnology. Li (2020) studied the cavitation flow on the surface of acylindrical body of revolution by using AMR, and compared the effectsof static mesh scheme and AMR in capturing the growth and sheddingof sheet cavitation, it was found that after the refinement of adaptive
mesh could better capture the local details in the cavitation region. After

KEY WORDS: cavitation, adaptive mesh refinement, relative
camberINTRODUCTION
Cavitation is a complex hydrodynamic phase transition phenomenon in
the low-pressure region of liquid, which has always been a classicalproblem in the field of hydrodynamics. The development process ofcavitation is divided into three stages: bubble cavitation, sheet cavitationand full cavitation. The initial cavitation is sudden but not violent, andits cavitation bubble collapse is both sudden and violent. This obvious

3344