Cavitation CFD Analyses Considering the Pressure Wave Propagation Within the Piping Systems

Cavitation surge is a typical unsteady phenomenon and can be a cause of severe noise and vibration problems in hydraulic systems. When the oscillation frequency of the piping systems surrounding the hydraulic devices under cavitation surge is high and/or the pipe length is long, the acoustic wave propagation within the piping systems must be considered. In this study cavitation is computed by two dimensional CFD with cavitation model and the pressure wave in the piping systems is computed by one dimensional distributed model of Method Of Characteristics (MOC). The cavitation CFD and MOC calculations are coupled through boundary conditions. The interactions of cavitation and pressure wave are observed in the computed results.