Researcher: Kie Okabayashi
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University
Abstract: When the pressure drops below the saturated vapor pressure in liquid flows, bubbles appear and disappear in a short time. This phenomenon is called cavitation, and it has various harmful effects on fluid machinery such as pumps and marine propellers. In Japan, numerical methods of cavitating flow have been developed, especially in response to the demand for flow analysis in liquid hydrogen turbopumps of rocket engines. However, the quantitative reproducibility of the lift coefficient is still not sufficient even flows around basic hydrofoils. In this study, the reproducibility of lift of cavitating flow around a hydrofoil was improved by resolving fine turbulent vortices. The computation to capture the fine-scale turbulence vortices tends to be large scale. Supercomputer SX-ACE can execute such computation in a high speed.