Scale resolving simulations of the non-cavitating and cavitating flows in an axial water jet pump

Paper in proceeding, 2020

In this paper, the non-cavitating and cavitating flows in the AxWJ-2 axial water jet pump of Johns Hopkins University are simulated using a Large Eddy Simulation(LES) approach. The non-cavitating simulations are performed on grids with different mesh resolutions and the effect of mesh resolution on predicting the performance and capturing the structure of Tip Leakage Vortex (TLV) is investigated. Based on this investigation, it can be concluded that the main feature of the non-cavitating TLV can be well captured compared with the experiment provided that a refinement region with at least 40 cells in the tip gap is used. The cavitating simulation using the same grid refinement also shows that the cavitating structures described in the experiment are predicted by the simulation. Furthermore, the structure of non-cavitating and cavitating TLVs are compared and the effects of cavitation on the structure of TLV are analyzed using the simulation results.