Joint research between Australia and Japan on the cavitation inception of marine propellers and control surfaces

International defence research collaboration between regional allies fosters the symbiotic development of scientific expertise and enables benchmarking of techniques and results. On 1 December 2015, Australia's Minister of Defence and Japan's Minister of Defense signed a Letter of Arrangement concerning joint research on Marine Hydrodynamics. This four-year research program is the first defence science and technology collaboration between Australia's Defence Science and Technology Group (DST) and Japan's Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Agency (ATLA).

In this project, ATLA's Flow Noise Simulator and the cavitation tunnel at the Australian Maritime College (AMC), an institute of the University of Tasmania with which DST has partnered, are being used to conduct hydrodynamic testing to develop expertise and experience with regard to cavitation inception about propellers and control surfaces of marine platforms. The phenomenon of cavitation occurs when a fluid changes from its liquid to vapour phase due to pressure reduction. This can be detrimental to the hydrodynamic, acoustic and structural performance of marine platforms.

The complimentary features of the Australian and Japanese test facilities are described in this paper and sample results from joint measurements of cavitation nuclei size distributions in the respective cavitation tunnels are presented. The implications of the results and the future work program are also discussed