LES Investigation with an Eulerian Stochastic Field Cavitation Model

Due to an ongoing trend of high injection pressures in the realm of internal combustion engines, the role of cavitation that typically happens inside the injector nozzle has become increasingly important. In this work, a large eddy simulation (LES) with cavitation modeled on the basis of an Eulerian Stochastic Field (ESF) method and a homogeneous mixture model is performed to investigate the role of cavitation on academic injector. The ESF cavitation model is coupled to a pressure based solver for the flow, which lowers the computational cost, thereby making the methodology highly applicable to realistic injector geometries. Moreover, the nature of the ESF method makes it more convenient to achieve a high scalability when applied to parallel cases, which gives the method an edge over cavitation models that are based on Lagrangian tracking. The result of the ESF simulation is compared against that from a typical single volume fraction solver for validation. The capability of the ESF model to capture the probability density function (PDF) of vapor bubble radii is also demonstrated.