An Experimental and Theoretical Study on Cavitating Cascades and Their Application to Cavitating Propellers
In order to develop an analytical tool for predicting the off-design performance of supercavitating propellers over a wide range of operating conditions, a lifting-line theory was combined with a two-dimensional supercavitating cascade theory. The results of this simple method provided fairly accurate predictions for the performance at fully developed cavitating conditions. It was indicative that the fully developed supercavitating (s/c) propellers had strong cascade effects on their performance, and also that the three-dimensional propeller geometry corrections could properly be made by the lifting-line theory. However, the predicted performance with this propeller theory showed a significant deviation from experimental data in the range of J's larger than Jdesign, where partially cavitating conditions are expected to occur. Effort was then made on improving the prediction capability of the above propeller theory at partially cavitating (p/c) conditions. A new nonlinear partially cavitating cascade theory was then developed to provide a proper 2-D loading basis under such conditions. Two-dimensional cascade experiments were then conducted to prove the accuracy of the p/c and s/c cascade theories. The measured forces and flow observations obtained in these experiments shed a new light on the relationship between the forces and cavitation numbers at small angles of incidence. Corrected lift and drag forces were then used in the propeller program. The calculated results for KT and KQ with the new force data successfully correlated with the experimental data, now covering a large J-range where the partially cavitating conditions exist.