Transition of cavitating flow to supercavitation within Venturi nozzle – hysteresis investigation

Abstract

Cavitation is usually considered as undesirable phenomena. On the other hand, it can be utilized in many applications. One of the technical applications is using cavitation in water treatment, where hydrodynamic cavitation seems to be effective way how to reduce cyanobacteria within large bulks of water. The main scope of this paper is investigation of the cavitation within Venturi nozzle during the transition from fully developed cavitation to supercavitation regime and vice versa. Dynamics of cavitation was investigated using experimental data of pressure pulsations and analysis of high speed videos, where FFT of the pixel intensity and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) of the records were done to identify dominant frequencies connected with the presence of cavitation. The methodology of the high speed (HS) records semiautomated analysis using the FFT was described. Obtained results were correlated and above that the possible presence of hysteresis was discussed.