Effects of a long-drive shaft on flow field around a high-speed boat propeller in Thailand using CFD

Abstract

The Long-Tail Boat (LTB) is a high-speed boat in Thailand. The propulsive system has a long-drive shaft that holds the propeller on the end of the shaft. It is used under inclined shaft conditions because of shallow water draft. Thus, the fluid flow into the propeller blade area is unsteady due to the cross-flow component. Therefore, the long-drive shaft is an important parameter in generating the flow field before entering the propeller blades, which affects propeller efficiency. This paper presents a numerical analysis of the flow field around a long-drive shaft and propeller blade areas in a full-scale propeller size using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solver. The unsteady propeller performance is carried out by considering inclined flow conditions. In addition, the computational results of fluid flow in terms of the pressure distributions and wake fields around a long-drive shaft and propeller are investigated, which influence the propeller performance and the generating drag forces by a long-drive shaft. The results can be applied to modify the long-drive shaft of boats. Highlights The Long-Tail Boat (LTB) is a local vessel in Thailand that has a high speed Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code ANSYS Fluent to study the effect of a long-drive shaft propeller with inclined shaft angles The long-drive shaft should be designed in suitable for operating the inclined shaft conditions because it will directly affect the propeller efficiency