Prediction of Waterjet Cavitation: End of Year FY08

The ultimate goal is the routine use of high-fidelity, turbulent flow modeling for the design of future waterjets. The purpose of the proposed effort is to carefully quantify the ability of a state-of-the-art homogeneous multiphase RANS solver, UNCLE-M, to predict the performance of marine propulsors over a range of cavitation numbers from single phase flow through thrust breakdown and over a variety of operating conditions. The effort is a code verification and validation effort focused on waterjet applications. During this FY computations have been completed and comparisons have been used to quality the effectiveness of the tools to predict cavity size and shape. In addition, the tools have been used to predict cavitation breakdown performance of an as yet untested waterjet.