Cavitation Scaling Experiments with Axisymmetric Bodies

Several experiments by Ceccio and Brennen (1991, 1989) and Kumar and Brennen (1992, 1991) have closely examined the interaction between individual cavitation bubbles and the boundary layer, as well as statistical properties of the acoustical signals produced by the bubble collapse. All of these experiments were, however, conducted in the same facility with the same headform size (5.08cm in diameter) and over a fairly narrow range of flow velocities (around 9m/s). Clearly this raises the issue of how the phenomena identified change with speed, scale and facility. The present paper describes experiments conducted in order to try to answer some of these important questions regarding the scaling of the cavitation phenomena. The experiments were conducted in the Large Cavitation Channel of the David Taylor Research Center in Memphis Tennessee, on geometrically similar Schiebe headforms which are 5.08, 25.4 and 50.8cm in diameter for speeds ranging up to 15m/s and for a range of cavitation numbers