The effect of water quality on tip vortex cavitation inception

The inception of tip vortex cavitation is very sensitive to water quality. In order to quantify the effect of water quality on the inception of tip vortex cavitation, we develop a motion model to describe the migration and growth of nuclei in water. An analytical solution of migration of nuclei in a vortex flow is obtained so that the capture times of various nuclei can be given out directly. A criterion is built to determine the critical nucleus in a certain nuclei spectra distribution. Tensile strength of the critical nucleus is used to quantify the effect of water quality and correct the tip vortex cavitation inception number. Finally this change of cavitation inception number is compared with experimental results to validate our model.