Study of supercavitation in confined and unconfined flow. – SUPERCAV

This project try to use the advantages of microfluidics to get a better understanding of confined and unconfined supercavitating flows.
Cavitation is often thought as a drawback responsible of vibration and erosion induced by bubble collapse. However, the phenomena of supercavitation bring fundamental and practical aspects that can be interesting for civil and military fields. Thanks to the development of a laser induced fluorescence technique coupled with confocal microscopy, our recent work has shown that even if water is considered as a non thermosensible fluid, large temperature gradient can be measured in the liquid phase near bubble cloud. Those temperature variation are induced by phase change. So the first goal of this proposal is first to applied the measurement technique we just developed to study thermal effects in supercavitating flow trough micro channels with a decrease of section or for a 2D object placed in such flow. The final purpose of this first work would be to reach a understand and describe with models phase change in supercavitating flow. The second topic of this proposal is the study and the control of the degazing operation with the help of supercavitation. This point was motivated by the fact that a continuous degazing process is not available in the industry and it could be interesting for various applications. In parallel, the project SUPERCAV will also investigate the numerical simulation of supercavitating flow with and without thermal effects. The comparison between experimental measurement and numerical results will be useful to understand the physic of such flow.