Performance Prediction of Composite Marine Propeller Under The Influence of Hull Wake

Abstract

In the recent past, several improvements in the design, development, material selection and manufacturing of marine propellers were achieved by improving higher performance. Adaptive propellers are being chosen as an alternative to the conventional marine propeller. Several alternative materials were proposed as a replacement for conventional metals or alloys. However, only limited materials exhibited their superior performance and were found to be beneficial. This paper aims to investigate the performance of adaptive propellers under the influence of wake conditions. Four materials were considered as candidate propeller materials, namely, Aluminium (Al), Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastic (CFRP), Glass Fibre Reinforced Plastic (GFRP) and epoxy.  RANS equation based CFD solver was adopted for estimating the hydrodynamic loads and transferred to a structural solver based on FEM to compute the deformation and stresses. A Co Simulation based FSI coupling algorithm was adopted to compute the two-way FSI coupling between the solvers. Hydrodynamic coefficients, tip deflection and stresses were computed and reported for the wake condition.