Properties of natural cavitation flows around a 2-d wedge in shallow water

When a body navigates with cavity in shallow water, both flexible free surface and rigid bottom wall will produce great influences on the cavity shape and hydrodynamic performances, and further affect the motion attitude and stability of the body. In the present work, characteristics of the natural cavitating flow around a 2-D symmetrical wedge in shallow water were investigated and the influences of two type boundaries on the flow pattern were analyzed. The Volume Of Fluid (VOF) multiphase flow method which is suitable for free surface problems was utilized, coupled with a natural cavitation model to deal with the mass-transfer process between liquid and vapor phases. Within the range of the cavitation number for computation (0.07–1.81), the cavity configurations would be divided into three types, viz., stable type, transition type and wake-vortex type. In this article, the shapes of the free surface and the cavity surface, and the hydrodynamic performance of the wedge were discussed under the conditions of relatively small cavitation number (< 0.256). The present numerical cavity lengths generally accord with experimental data. When the cavitation number was decreased, the cavity was found to become longer and thicker, and the scope of the deformation of the free surface also gradually extends. The free surface and the upper cavity surface correspond fairly to their shapes. However, the lower side of the cavity surface was rather leveled due to the influence of wall boundary. The lift and drag coefficients of this 2-D wedge basically keep linear relations with the natural cavitation number smaller than 0.157, whereas direct proportion for drag and inverse proportion for lift.