Estimation of the required power of bow thruster based on numerical simulation

Abstract

The paper presents the results of hydrodynamic characteristics of bow thruster (thrust coefficient K T , torque coefficient K Q ) in various pitch angles using RANSE method and compared to the experiment data provided by Maritime Advanced Research Centre (CTO S.A.), Gdansk, Poland. The required power of the bow thruster is estimated based on those numerical simulations. To get a better energy efficiency, the thrust-to-power ratio with pitch angle can be compared. The simulation of a rotating propeller is done using the sliding mesh approach. The k-epsilon turbulence model is utilized with commercial code ANSYS CFX when analyzing bow thruster performance. The results show that the difference between numerical and experiment results is quite high. Moreover, the power and the thrust-to-power ratio increase with the pitch angles and the bow thruster performs the best efficiency at the pitch angle of around 19°.