Marine propeller modeling and performance analysis using CFD tools

A marine propeller generates adequate thrust to propel a vessel at some design speed. so, propeller is the core to optimum performance on a ship. Considerations are made to match the engine ’s power and shaft speed, as well as the size of the vessel and the ship’s operating speed, with an appropriately designed propeller. As marine propeller has complicated geometries, the flow around the propeller is complicated. In generally, the performance characteristics of a propeller is determined and analyze by experiments like open water and self-propulsion model test which are costly at the initial stage of the design. Numerical analysis using Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations could be an important alternative on this case. This study presents the investigation of marine propeller hydrodynamic performance and parameters through Computational Fluid Dynamic analysis. In this paper, a B-series propeller model is developed with respect to some design constraints such as ship speed, vessel draft etc. and analyzed the performance using CFD tools. In this analysis, we consider Realizable k-ω Turbulence Model & Multiple Reference Frame Model. Results found that all thrust coefficient (KT) and torque coefficient 10 (KQ) decreases with the increasing advance coefficient (J). The efficiency of propeller performance had also consistently showed characteristic trend of nonlinear increases to a peak an optimum value before decreasing drastically with increasing J value. The numerical results obtained from CFD Tool are compared with theoretical available publish data.