Drag reduction of a rapid vehicle in supercavitating flow

Abstract

Supercavitation is one of the most attractive technologies to achieve high speed for underwater vehicles. However, the multiphase flow with high-speed around the supercavitating vehicle (SCV) is difficult to simulate accurately. In this paper, we use modified the turbulent viscosity formula in the Standard K-Epsilon (SKE) turbulent model to simulate the supercavitating flow. The numerical results of flow over several typical cavitators are in agreement with the experimental data and theoretical prediction. In the last part, a flying SCV was studied by unsteady numerical simulation. The selected computation setup corresponds to an outdoor supercavitating experiment. Only very limited experimental data was recorded due to the difficulties under the circumstance of high-speed underwater condition. However, the numerical simulation recovers the whole scenario, the results are qualitatively reasonable by comparing to the experimental observations. The drag reduction capacity of supercavitation is evaluated by comparing with a moving vehicle launching at the same speed but without supercavitation. The results show that the supercavitation reduces the drag of the vehicle dramatically.

Keywords

• Drag reduction
• Numerical simulation
• Supercavitation
• Underwater vehicle
• Turbulent model
• Multiphase flow
• High-speed torpedo
• Supercavitating vehicle
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Cavitation number