VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION OF SINGLE PHASE AND CAVITATING FLOWS USING AN OPEN SOURCE CFD TOOL
Open Access
- Author:
- Erney, Robert Wade
- Graduate Program:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Eric Paterson, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Eric Paterson, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- validation
verification
openFOAM
cfd
cavitation
hydrodynamic benchmark - Abstract:
- This thesis presents an open source implementation of a cavitation model and assesses the effectiveness of the solver with previous work on several validation cases. The free computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package OpenFOAM is used to first validate single phase solutions on a flat plate, hemispherical headform, and a NACA0012 airfoil. Motivated by the need for a simulation tool that is free to the public yet still reliable, verification and validation are essential if a mainstream shift is to be made from the costly licensing fees of commercial codes to free open source software. After analyzing forces, convergence history, various finite volume schemes, grid studies, and turbulence models for simple, single-phase cases, the results are used as a baseline for more complicated cases such as two-phase cavitating hemispherical headforms and NACA hydrofoils. The CFD results show good agreement with the experimental data for both single phase and cavitating flows. For the single phase solutions, both the steady and unsteady solution algorithms were shown to produce accurate, converged results. Cavitating flow cases demonstrated that both the compressible and incompressible cavitation solvers are capable of providing accurate and realistic results when compared to proven experimental data. Verifying and validating these hydrodynamic benchmarks has provided insight into open source capabilities of OpenFOAM and allows future work to further investigate the phenomenon of cavitation on more sophisticated hydrodynamic equipment such as propellers and water jets.