In this paper, the risk of cavitation erosion is assessed in a commercial water-jet pump using a recently developed numerical erosion assessment method by Arabnejad et al. (2021, “Numerical Assessment of Cavitation Erosion Risk Using Incompressible Simulation of Cavitating Flows,” Wear, 464–465, p. 203529). This assessment is performed for two flow conditions with different cavitation erosion risk according to the experimental paint tests and the high erosion risk areas identified by the method are compared with the experimental results. This comparison shows that the applied method is capable of both identifying the regions of high erosion risk and also capturing the difference between the cavitation erosion risk in the two studied conditions. The latter capability of the numerical assessment method, which has not been reported in the literature for other published methods, is one step forward toward the application of the method in the design process of hydraulic machines. Furthermore, the numerical results are analyzed to explain the reasons for different erosion risk in the two conditions. This analysis reveals that this difference is mostly related to the stronger flow nonuniformities entering the rotor in the most erosive condition. Using the numerical results, one reason behind these stronger nonuniformities is identified to be the stronger bursting of vortices shed from the shaft in the most erosive condition.

The integration of intermittent renewable energy resources to the grid system requires that hydro turbines regularly operate at part-load conditions. Reliable operation of hydro turbines at these conditions is typically limited by the formation of a Rotating Vortex Rope (RVR) in the draft tube. In this paper, we investigate the formation of this vortex using the scale-resolving methods SST-SAS, wall-modeled LES (WMLES), and zonal WMLES. The numerical results are first validated against the available experimental data, and then analyzed to explain the effect of using different scale-resolving methods in detail. It is revealed that although all methods can capture the main features of the RVRs, the WMLES method provides the best quantitative agreement between the simulation results and experiment. Furthermore, cavitating simulations are performed using WMLES method to study the effect of cavitation on the flow in the turbine. These effects of cavitation are shown to be highly dependent on the amount of vapor in the RVR. If the amount of vapor is small, cavitation induces broadband high-frequency fluctuations in the pressure and forces exerted on the turbine. As the amount of cavitation increases, these fluctuations tend to have a distinct dominant frequency which is different from the frequency of the RVR.