Morphological changes of ventilated supercavities in continuous and discrete incident gust flows

Abstract

The behavior of ventilated supercavities under continuous and discrete gust flows was tested in a medium-sized high-speed cavitation tunnel at the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering. To investigate the influences of experimental facilities on supercavitation observations, the experimental results were compared with experiments at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory under similar flow conditions. We suggested a new threshold criterion at which the total cavity length is shortened, which predicts that the total cavity length shrinks when the vertical velocity of an incident flow reaches approximately 4.5% of the horizontal flow velocity. Additionally, we found that discrete gust flows resulted in changes in the cavity shape that were smaller than those in continuous gust flows.