Cavitation is a significant problem for the shipping industry as it can lead to ship vibration and erosion, both resulting in increased maintenance costs. Therefore, a better understanding of cavitation and an accurate prediction capability are important.
Lloyd's Register has performed cavitation observations and measurements at ship scale and, from that, has developed a better understanding of cavitation and its effects, which are discussed in this paper. These observations showed that details of the cavitating flow are paramount for the erosive potential of the flow. Furthermore, recommendations on how to avoid cavitation damage are given.
The paper also discusses the improvements of cavitation prediction with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Unlike more traditional computation methods, CFD has the ability to predict small scale features in the flow, which are important for determining the erosive potential of both sheet and vortex cavitation.