Cavitation Instabilities of Hydrofoils and Cascades

Abstract

Studies on cavitation instabilities of hydrofoils and cascades are reviewed to obtain fundamental understandings of the instabilities observed in turbopump inducers. Most of them are based on the stability analysis of two-dimensional inviscid cavitating flow. The most important finding of the analysis is that the cavitation instabilities depend only on the mean cavity length. For a hydrofoil, the characteristic length is the chord length and partial/transitional cavity oscillation occurs with shorter/longer cavity than 75% of the chord length. For cascades, the characteristic length is the blade spacing and various modes of instabilities are predicted when the mean cavity is longer than 65% of the spacing. In the last part, rotating choke is shown to occur when the cavity becomes longer than the spacing.