Numerical investigation of cavitation on a NACA0015 hydrofoil by means of OpenFOAM

The prediction of cavitation phenomena plays important role in the design of new hydraulic machines, being able to improve their operative range and reliability. Actually the flow field at the leading edge of a cavitating hydrofoil can be representative of the flow over the leading edges of a real cavitating impeller. Hence, the flow past a symmetric NACA0015 hydrofoil is numerically investigated by means of the open source code OpenFOAM (in its multi-phase flow formulation testing several mass transfer functions) and the results are compared against experimental data. Furthermore, within the RANS approach, two different types of transitional turbulence model (namely, the k-ω SST and the k-kl-ω) have been considered in order to evaluate their capability of predicting the interaction between sheet and cloud cavitation. Our implementation of the Zwart-Gerber-Belamri cavitation model in OpenFOAM allowed us to obtain a better agreement with the experimental results with respect to those obtained with the OpenFOAM's defaults models.