Numerical Prediction of Wall Effect on Propeller in Restricted Channel

Abstract

In restricted channel, the hydrodynamic performance of propeller is affected by the wall. In the present work, two cylindrical channels with different diameters being 1.8D and 5.0D are adopted to study the influence of wall on the hydrodynamic performance and wake field of the propeller model DTMB4119. The numerical simulations are carried out by the single-phase solver pim-pleDyMFoam in open source platform OpenFOAM. The Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations (RANS) are adopted to solve the flow field. The arbitrary mesh interface (AMI) method is used to simulate the rotation of propeller. The designed advance ratio, J = 0.833, is applied in all the computations. For the 5.0 D case, the predicted results of open water performance are in good agreement with experiment data. In restricted channel, the predicted results of thrust and torque coefficients are larger than the open water case. The pressure on the wall of restricted channel downstream increases and approaches the results in open water gradually. Due to the flux conservation, higher negative induced velocity is investigated in the flow field of the propeller in restricted channel.