Title
Investigation of the Behavior of Ventilated Supercavities
Abstract
A study was carried out to investigate various aspects of an axisymmetric,
artificially supercavitating vehicle. One of the main focuses of the study was to
investigate the effects of blockage introduced when conducting experiments in a water
tunnel. Blockage influenced all of the experiments investigated. The effect of blockage
was to set a lower limit on the cavitation number attainable. Experimental results were
compared to numerical results from previous researchers. Froude number effects on
cavitation number and supercavity dimensions were investigated. An advantage of this
study over previous supercavitation experiments conducted at Saint Anthony Falls
Laboratory is the ability to directly measure the pressure inside the supercavity. This
knowledge is important for an underwater vehicle that requires drag reduction, by means
of an artificial supercavity, to accelerate to speeds where natural supercavitation is
possible. Next, the effects of model configuration are investigated in two ways. The first
is the effect of the size of disc cavitator, and the second is the influence of the presence of
a body inside the supercavity. For a supercavity, the method of closure and air
entrainment is an important design consideration. For this study, a detailed examination
of the closure method for various model configurations was explored. Finally, an effort
was made to correlate water tunnel experiments with unbounded flow. This was done by
computing an equivalent unbounded flow cavitation number from values obtained in a
water tunnel.
Description
University of Minnesota Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering thesis. January 2011. Major: Mechanical Engineering. Advisor: Roger Arndt. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 71 pages.
Suggested Citation
Kawakami, Ellison Gordon.
(2011).
Investigation of the Behavior of Ventilated Supercavities.
Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy,
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/103954.