A research program designed to investigate the effect of the fractionation of a foil on tip vortex cavitation has been conducted. It encompassed the performance of experiments with parent and fractionated wings in a cavitation tunnel, and numerical computation of the foil characteristics using a commercially available CFD code. The code give lift and pressure coefficients very close to those obtained experimentally. Moreover, it showed that the fractionation does not affect significantly the pressure distribution in the region near the tip. This is confirmed by the fact that the inception critical cavitation number of the fractionated foils, divided by the Reynolds number of the parent foil to the power 0.4, as a function of the square of the lift coefficient of the parent foils, correlates very satisfactorily the results obtained with a parent foil.
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