Cavitation Simulation of Highly Skewed Propellers

Abstract

Blade skew plays an important role in the prohibition of propeller cavitation and needs to be analyzed quantitatively. For this purpose, the cavitation of model propellers with different skew DTMB4381, 4382, 4383 and 4384 are investigated using commercially available software Ansys-Fluent. The SST k   model was used for turbulence modeling, and the QUICK scheme was selected as the discretization scheme. The results show that present simulation is accurate and reliable for predicting the propeller hydrodynamics with cavitation. On this basis, the influences of different skew on the appearance of cavitation are analyzed. It is found that the highly skewed blade can effectively delay the occurrence of cavitation.