The present paper analyses a series of Computational Fluid Dynamic simulations of the cavitating flow around a two-dimensional NACA0015 foil. The foil is placed at 6° angle of attack and the cavitation number is 1.1. Two mesh designs, namely a block-structured topology and an unstructured topology, are compared; additionally, grid refinements and time step refinements are carried out. Solution Verification is addressed with calculation of the discretization error and the numerical uncertainty.
The numerical uncertainty for the average lift coefficient is found to be large, up to 15%. The reason is the difficulty of achieving a grid independent solution: with very fine meshes, the flow shifts from an attached, oscillating sheet cavity pattern to a regime dominated by shedding of cavity clouds. On the other hand, neither the time resolution nor the choice of grid topology influence largely the flow pattern; instead, they only lead to differences in the maximum and minimum cavity size.
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