A challenge to cavitation modeling in the outlet flow of an EHL contact

This paper is a numerical study on the prediction of a cavitation bubble in the wake of an elasto-hydrodynamically lubricated ball-on-plate contact as observed in experiments at low velocity. A standard EHL-model is coupled with an elementary 2-phase pressure-density model, which yields a strong density decrease for sub-atmospheric pressures. A cavitation bubble can indeed be predicted, but its length is highly underpredicted when compared with available experimental results. Accurate prediction appears to call for more advanced fluid modeling, e.g. the physics of cavitation and aspects of 3D 2-phase flow.