Numerical Simulation of Propulsion and Cavitation Performance of Marine Propellers

Abstract

Numerical simulation has become a practical tool for marine propeller designers. However, compared with experiments, the management and evaluation of the accuracy is generally more difficult. Especially when cavitation is involved, reliability of CFD is still much lower than that of experiments conducted in a cavitation tunnel. Uncertainty in CFD arises mainly from the approximation used in the mathematical model and discretization of the model. To clarify the sources of uncertainty and improve accuracy, it is necessary to carry out careful investigations through comparisons with reliable experimental data. In this study, numerical simulations of non-cavitating and cavitating propellers in various conditions were performed and the results were compared with experimental data.

Cavitation Simulation of Highly Skewed Propellers

“…The height of the cell adjacent to the blade surface is kept at unity in the viscous unit. Other meshing parameters are chosen following the previous studies [7,8], so that the grid dependency is sufficiently small for the purpose of the simulation. The commercially available software Ansys-Fluent is used as the solver, which has been successfully applied to simulate the viscous flow around marine propellers.…”