Hydrodynamic cavitation is the formation, growth and subsequent collapse of vapor bubbles in a moving liquid. It is extremely important to determine conditions of cavitation inception and when it starts damaging industrial equipment. In some cases, such as hydrodynamic cleaning it is important to understand how to improve the cavitation phenomenon in order to enhance cleaning properties. The cavitation number is a parameter used to predict cavitation and its potential effects. In this paper we discuss limitations of this parameter and demonstrate that it cannot be considered sufficient to predict cavitation inception and development in the fluid flow. The experimental setup was designed and built to study cavitation inception in various nozzles. RANS SST k–ω turbulence model was used in this study to model turbulent flow in ANSYS Fluent. CFD calculations were compared to experimental results. It was shown that cavitation inception was sensitive to change in nozzle geometry and, since geometrical parameters are not included in cavitation number formula, scenarios of cavitation inception can be different at the same cavitation number.

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