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Large eddy simulation of cavitating flows with dynamic adaptive mesh refinement using OpenFOAM

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Abstract

Cavitating flows are dominated by large gradients of physical properties and quantities containing complicated interfacial structures and lots of multi-scale eddies that need to be accurately characterized using a high-resolution mesh. The present work, within OpenFOAM, proposes an effective modeling framework using the large eddy simulation (LES) approach along with the volume of fluid (VOF) method to simulate the two-phase flow system and applies the Schnerr-Sauer model to calculate the mass-transfer rate between water and vapor. The adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) which is a powerful tool for allocating high-resolution grids only to the region of the greatest concern is adopted for improving the solution of interfacial structures. The effect of grid size is firstly investigated and the time-averaged quantities are verified against the experimental data, and then simulations of cavitating flows are successfully achieved to precisely characterize the features of cavitation with automatically and dynamically refining the mesh. As the refinement only takes place in the interfacial region, high-precision simulations can be achieved with limited computational resources, and the method shows promising prospects for modeling of the multi-scale, time-critical and computationally intensive cavitating flows.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Jiangsu Province Science Foundation for Youths (Grant No. BK20180505), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2019B14914)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Energy and Electrical Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 211100, China

    Lin-min Li, Bi-tao Wang, Chen Shi, Jun-jie Shi & Chang Xu

  2. College of Water Conservancy and Hydropower Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210098, China

    Lin-min Li

  3. Anhui Jinzhai Pumped Storage Power Co., Ltd, Lu’an, 237300, China

    Dai-qing Hu & Yu-cheng Liu

Authors
  1. Lin-min Li
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  2. Dai-qing Hu
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  3. Yu-cheng Liu
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  4. Bi-tao Wang
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  5. Chen Shi
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  6. Jun-jie Shi
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  7. Chang Xu
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Correspondence to Lin-min Li.

Additional information

Project supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2018M630502).

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Li, Lm., Hu, Dq., Liu, Yc. et al. Large eddy simulation of cavitating flows with dynamic adaptive mesh refinement using OpenFOAM. J Hydrodyn 32, 398–409 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42241-019-0041-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42241-019-0041-1

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