A High Resolution Scheme for Cavitating Flow

A high resolution scheme for solving gas-liquid two-phase flows with cavitation is described. This scheme uses the curvilinear coordinate grid and solves the density based momentum equations for mixture of gas-liquid medium with a preconditioning method to treat both compressible and incompressible flow characteristics. The present preconditioned method is based on the Runge-Kutta explicit finite-difference scheme, and is improved by using the diagonalization, the flux difference splitting and the MUSCL-TVD schemes to save computational effort and to increase stability and resolvability, especially at gas-liquid contact surfaces. A homogeneous equilibrium cavitation model is used to treat the gas-liquid two-phase medium in cavitating flow as a locally homogeneous pseudo-single-phase medium. Therefore, it is easy to solve cavitating flow, including wave propagation, large density changes and incompressible flow characteristic at low Mach number. Some numerical results obtained by the present scheme are shown.