An energy conservative method to predict the erosive aggressiveness of collapsing cavitating structures and cavitating flows from numerical simulations.

Highlights • A method to assess the aggressiveness of cavitating flows with CFD is developed. • The energy balance of cavity energy conversion into impact power is investigated. • The driving pressure distribution plays a major role in this energy conversion. • It is crucial to know the sensitivity of a material to isolated extreme impacts. Abstract A new technique is proposed in this study to assess the erosive aggressiveness of cavitating flows from numerical flow simulations. The technique is based on the cavitation intensity approach by Leclercq et al. (2017), predicting the instantaneous surface impact power of collapsing cavities from the potential energy hypothesis (see Hammitt, 1963; Vogel and Lauterborn, 1988). The cavitation intensity approach by Leclercq et al. (2017) is further developed and the amount of accumulated surface energy caused by the near wall collapse of idealized cavity types is verified against analytical predictions. Furthermore, two different impact power functions are introduced to compute a weighted time average of the impact power distribution caused by the cavity collapses in cavitating flows. The extreme events are emphasized to an extent specified by a single model parameter. Thus, the impact power functions provide a physical measure of the cavitating flow aggressiveness. This approach is applied to four idealized cavities, as well as to the cavitating flow around a NACA0015 hydrofoil. Areas subjected to aggressive cavity collapse events are identified and the results are compared against experimental paint test results by Van Rijsbergen et al. (2012) and the numerical erosion risk assessment by Li et al. (2014). The model is implemented as a runtime post-processing tool in the open source CFD environment OpenFOAM (2018), employing the inviscid Euler equations and mass transfer source terms to model the cavitating flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]