摘要
The objective of marine propeller design optimization study is to obtain a propeller with minimum power absorption, maximum efficiency and good materials resistance. In this study, results of numerical simulation carried out on the flow around a conventional marine propeller are presented. The investigation focused on the aspects related to the influence of skew magnitude, thickness and blade number on the propeller performances. First, open water performances of a conventional propeller model DTMB 4148 was estimated using RANS （Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes） method. The flow around rotating propeller model was analyzed in the steady state using RANS approach of the commercial CFD （computational fluid dynamics） code fluent. The results provide good agreement with literature data. Numerical results show that the number of blades has an influence on the open water performances of marine propellers. It＇s noticed that the best propeller has four or five blades from only the hydrodynamic aspect. The thickness blade effect has been studied for the same propeller model and compared to the blade with three different thickness values. Results of the calculation show that the blade thickness increases moderately the propeller efficiency. Finally, numerical simulation is performed to study the magnitude skew effect on the propeller blade performance, so three different models were generated. The results of the simulation show that the skew distribution has a positive effect on the open water performances of the marine propellers.
