Computation of hydrodynamic mass and damping coefficients for a cavitating marine propeller flow using a panel method

Abstract

The present paper deals with the numerical calculation of hydrodynamic mass and damping coefficients under consideration of unsteady sheet cavitation on marine propeller flows. In the first part of the paper, the mathematical and numerical background behind the numerical method is introduced. The numerical calculations carried out in this work are based on a low-order panel method. Panel methods belong to the class of collocation techniques and are applied to obtain a numerical solution of a potential flow based system of boundary integral equations. They are suitable for the present application because of their short computation time which makes them applicable in the design process of marine propellers.Additionally, two different approaches for the determination of hydrodynamic masses and damping are introduced in this work. The hydrodynamic masses and damping are important in studies of the ship motion in seaway and in the analysis of vibrations of a vessel and its appendages. The developed approaches are applied on a propeller flow in heave motion. Hereby, the calculations are performed for a non-rotating and rotating propeller under non-cavitating and cavitating conditions. The results obtained from the simulations are discussed in detail and an outlook is given.