• cavitation
• cfd
• multiphase
• sailboat
• star-ccm+

This thesis aims to define a numerical method to study supercavitating wings, that can easily adapt to different hydrofoil geometric configurations, with reduced computational cost, good accuracy and without additional human work to adapt the initial mesh.
This work is included in a collaboration between Syroco, a French company that aims to break the World Sailing Speed Record, the University of Pisa and the Fluid Dynamics Division of Cubit, which provides consulting, hardware, resources and know-how to the project.
The simulations use a reference domain and wing with a RANS approach, k-epsilon turbulence model, VOF multiphase model and Singhal model for cavitation.
The analysis carried out in the present work compares different meshing methods and their behaviour with cavitation phenomenon, focusing the attention on obtaining a good resolution and reducing computational costs. The best mesh setup obtained is then coupled with the Adaptive Mesh Refinement tool available in STAR-CCM+.
This tool is able to adapt the mesh dinamically during the simulation, refining and coarsening it in accordance with the adaption criterion defined by the user. Results have shown that with this method it is possible to obtain the same accuracy and computational cost as the one without AMR, but with a major reduction in human time needed to setup the simulation.
The final setup is then applied on different wings geometries to study the effectiveness of the method.