Scaling of tip vortex cavitation inception noise with a bubble dynamics model accounting for nuclei size distribution

The acoustic pressure generated by cavitation inception in a tip vortex flow was simulated in water, containing a realistic bubble nuclei size distribution using a surface-averaged pressure (SAP) spherical bubble dynamics model. The flow field was obtained by the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes computations for three geometrically similar scales of a finite-span elliptic hydrofoil. An acoustic criterion, which defines cavitation inception as the flow condition at which the number of acoustical peaks above a pre-selected pressure level exceeds a reference number per unit time, was applied to the three scales. It was found that the scaling of cavitation inception depended on the reference values (pressure amplitude and number of peaks) selected. Scaling effects (i.e., deviation from the classical sigma(i)proportional to R-e(0.4)) increase as the reference inception criteria become more stringent (lower threshold pressures and less number of peaks). Larger scales tend to detect more cavitation inception events per unit time than obtained by classical scaling because a relatively larger number of nuclei are excited by the tip vortex at the larger scale due to simultaneous increase of the nuclei capture area and of the size of the vortex core: The average nuclei size in the nuclei distribution was also found to have an important impact on cavitation inception number Scaling effects (i.e., deviation from classical expressions) become more important as the average nuclei size decreases.