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The paper addresses a theoretical study of the added mass effect in cavitating flow. The cavitation is considered to induce a strong time-space variation of the fluid density at the interface between an inviscid fluid and a three-degree-of-freedom rigid section. The coupled problem is then simplified to a Laplace equation written for the pressure with a boundary condition at the fluid-structure interface depending on the acceleration, the velocity of the structure and on the rate of change of flow density. It is shown that contrary to the homogeneous flow, the added mass operator is not symmetrical and depends on the flow through fluid density variation. The added mass coefficients decrease as the cavitation increases which should induce an increase of the natural structural frequencies. The model shows also an added damping operator related to the rate of change of flow density. Added damping coefficients are found to be positive or negative according to the rate of change of the fluid density, indicating the possibility of instability development between flexible structures and unsteady cavitating flows.

Compressed air energy storage systems (CAES) have demonstrated the potential for the energy storage of power plants. One of the key factors to improve the efficiency of CAES is the efficient thermal management to achieve near isothermal air compression/expansion processes. This paper presents a review on the Liquid Piston (LP) technology for CAES as a timely documentary on this topic with rapidly growing interests. Various aspects are discussed including the state-of-the-art on LP projects all over the world and the trend of development, the coupled fluid flow and heat transfer during the compression/expansion operations, and different actions proposed and implemented to enhance the heat transfer inside the piston column.It has been found that LP is a promising concept for isothermal CAES. However, the complex and transient fluid flow and heat transfer behaviors inside the LP are difficult to characterize and master. To enhance the heat transfer and increase the efficiency of the compression/expansion processes many approaches have been tested including liquid spray, wire mesh, porous media, optimal trajectory, hollow spheres and optimal geometry of the piston column. Numerous Nusselt number's empirical correlations have also been proposed to estimate the

The present work deals with an original study of the dynamics of an elastic structure immerged in an unsteady partial cavitating flow. The latter corresponds to the case of a leading edge attached cavity that exhibits periodical oscillations. The elastic structure is a cantilevered rectangular hydrofoil made of polyacetal plastic material (E = 3GPa). The computational fluid dynamics is based on a 2D unsteady single fluid model of cavitation with a barotropic law and a k – ε – RNG modified turbulent model. The computational structure dynamics is carried out using a 3D finite element code. The fluid structure coupling is based on a chained weak coupling algorithm for which the 2D unsteady local fluid loading is computed on a rigid hydrofoil, then interpolated on the 3D deformable hydrofoil to compute the structural dynamics. The results are compared to the experiment ones carried out in the hydrodynamic tunnel of the research institute at the French Naval Academy for flow conditions close to the numerical ones. It is shown that in spite of a weak coupling algorithm, the forced vibration due to the periodical behaviour of the unsteady partial cavity is rather well predicted by the computation and compared favourably with the experiments. However, the experiments reveal that cavitation influences the natural modal response of the elastic structure in a more complex fluid structure interaction process.