Hydrodynamic cavitation investigations with homogeneous and inhomogeneous multiphase flow models in OpenFOAM context

Cavitation is a generally harmful phenomenon associated with marine propulsion, process and nuclear engineering. It is commonly assessed numerically with homogeneous flow models. An inhomogeneous modelling approach employs conservation equations for each phase separately, and interfacial transfer terms are included, enabling a physically more sound framework for cavitating flow predictions. We conduct the numerical simulations with OpenFOAM to compare the effects of homogeneous and inhomogeneous formulations on the results in a cavitation application. We investigate steady and unsteady cavitation on a NACA hydrofoil in a cavitation tunnel. The present analyses with the inhomogeneous modelling are among first applications of the availablemodels andmethods for cavitating problems. Despite the simple interfacial closuremodels applied in the
present work, inhomogeneous modelling resulted in overall better agreement with experiments for the test cases.