A 3-D Potential Based Boundary Element Method for Modelling and Simulation of Marine Propeller Flows

Abstract

AbstractThe present article focuses on the modelling and simulation of marine propeller flows in port basins motivated by the increasing challenges on ports for future generations of container ships. In the future, the cargo handling in ports will rise and ship dimensions will increase. The induced unsteady pressures on quay walls caused by the propeller slipstream of huge ships is far higher than by smaller units. The employed method aims to accurately predict operational loads induced by marine propeller flows on quay walls in ports.In the first part of the article, the mathematical model based on potential flow theory is derived and the numerical approach is introduced. The numerical method used in this work is a three-dimensional first-order panel method which is implemented into the in-house simulation tool panMARE. In addition, a cavitation model has been developed and implemented in panMARE in order to include the influence of sheet cavitation effects on propeller's performance and propeller induced pressure pulses on quay walls, which is crucial for the overall accuracy of the attainable results.In the second part of this work, the proposed cavitation model is validated and an application case is introduced to investigate the capabilities of the developed method. Hereby, a marine propeller is simulated close to a quay wall both in cavitating and in non-cavitating conditions.