An iteratively coupled solution of the cavitating flow on marine propellers using BEM

Abstract

An iteratively coupled solution method for the calculation of the cavitating potential flow on propellers with a potential based Boundary Element Method is investigated. By separately treating the perturbation due to the cavity a reduced system of equations is derived for successive approximations to the cavity source strength. The system is iteratively coupled to the complete cavitating system in the cavity planform iterartion. The advantage is that the cavitating system matrix is identical to the matrix of the wetted flow problem and needs only to be inverted once, avoiding new matrix inversions at each iteration steps in the cavity planform. The numerical studies are carried out for the MARIN S-Propeller and the INSEAN E779A propeller.