Diffuse interface model for high speed cavitating underwater systems

High speed underwater systems involve many modelling and simulation difficulties related to shocks, expansion waves and evaporation fronts. Modern propulsion systems like underwater missiles also involve extra difficulties related to non-condensable high speed gas flows. Such flows involve many continuous and discontinuous waves or fronts and the difficulty is to model and compute correctly jump conditions across them, particularly in unsteady regime and in multi-dimensions. To this end a new theory has been built that considers the various transformation fronts as ‘diffuse interfaces’. Inside these diffuse interfaces relaxation effects are solved in order to reproduce the correct jump conditions. For example, an interface separating a compressible non-condensable gas and compressible water is solved as a multiphase mixture where stiff mechanical relaxation effects are solved in order to match the jump conditions of equal pressure and equal normal velocities. When an interface separates a metastable liquid and its vapor, the situation becomes more complex as jump conditions involve pressure, velocity, temperature and entropy jumps. However, the same type of multiphase mixture can be considered in the diffuse interface and stiff velocity, pressure, temperature and Gibbs free energy relaxation are used to reproduce the dynamics of such fronts and corresponding jump conditions. A general model, based on multiphase flow theory is thus built. It involves mixture energy and mixture momentum equations together with mass and volume fraction equations for each phase or constituent. For example, in high velocity flows around underwater missiles, three phases (or constituents) have to be considered: liquid, vapor and propulsion gas products. It results in a flow model with 8 partial differential equations. The model is strictly hyperbolic and involves waves speeds that vary under the degree of metastability. When none of the phase is metastable, the non-monotonic sound speed is recovered. When phase transition occurs, the sound speed decreases and phase transition fronts become expansion waves of the equilibrium system. The model is built on the basis of asymptotic analysis of a hyperbolic total non-equilibrium multiphase flow model, in the limit of stiff mechanical relaxation. Closure relations regarding heat and mass transfer are built under the examination of entropy production. The mixture equation of state (EOS) is based on energy conservation and mechanical equilibrium of the mixture. Pure phases EOS are used in the mixture EOS instead of cubic one in order to prevent loss of hyperbolicity in the spinodal zone of the phase diagram. The corresponding model is able to deal with metastable states without using Van der Waals representation.