Analysis of Thermal Effects in a Cavitating Orifice Using Rayleigh Equation and Experiments

The cavitation phenomenon interests a wide range of machines, from internal combustion engines to turbines and pumps of all sizes. It affects negatively the hydraulic machines’ performance and may cause materials’ erosion. The cavitation, in most cases, is a phenomenon that develops at a constant temperature, and only a relatively small amount of heat is required for the formation of a significant volume of vapor, and the flow is assumed isothermal. However, in some cases, such as thermosensible fluids and cryogenic liquid, the heat transfer needed for the vaporization is such that phase change occurs at a temperature lower than the ambient liquid temperature. The focus of this research is the experimental and analytical studies of the cavitation phenomena in internal flows in the presence of thermal effects. Experiments have been done on water and nitrogen cavitating flows in orifices at different operating conditions. Transient growth process of the cloud cavitation induced by flow through the throat is observed using high-speed video images and analyzed by pressure signals. The experiments show different cavitating behaviors at different temperatures and different fluids; this is related to the bubble dynamics inside the flow. So to investigate possible explanations for the influence of fluid temperature and of heat transfer during the phase change, initially, a steady, quasi-one-dimensional model has been implemented to study an internal cavitating flow. The nonlinear dynamics of the bubbles has been modeled by Rayleigh–Plesset equation. In the case of nitrogen, thermal effects in the Rayleigh equation are taken into account by considering the vapor pressure at the actual bubble temperature, which is different from the liquid temperature far from the bubble. A convective approach has been used to estimate the bubble temperature. The quasisteady one-dimensional model can be extensively used to conduct parametric studies useful for fast estimation of the overall performance of any geometric design. For complex geometry, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamic (CFD) codes are necessary. In the present work good agreements have been found between numerical predictions by the CFD FLUENT code, in which a simplified form of the Rayleigh equation taking into account thermal effects has been implemented by external user routines and some experimental observations.