Author(s): Ernesto Casartelli; Omid Z. Mehdizadeh; Luca Mangani

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Keywords: No Keywords

Abstract: The paper presents unsteady cavitation simulations of the Francis 99 test case at part load conditions. These are computed using a barotropic cavitation model recently implemented in an industrial coupled pressure-based CFD solver on CPU and GPU. Both code implementations are identical, and this is reflected in the results. The GPU version provides drastic speedup of more than two orders of magnitude for the unsteady simulations (also including sliding-grid rotor-stator interface) when compared to the CPU version. This will enable engineers to systematically conduct simulations, also including cavitation effects, over a wide range of operating conditions early in the design cycle, where a short turnaround time is critical. The implementation of the barotropic cavitation model, which is based on an equation of state (EOS), is briefly described. Unlike the more commonly used transport equation models (TEM), the barotropic model does not require fine-tuning of several parameters, is highly robust and yet sufficiently accurate for most engineering purposes. Global data are used for validation purposes and show good agreement with experimental values and available literature.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/1561/1/012012

Year: 2025