Measurement of Pressure Distribution on Full Scale Propellers

Abstract

This paper describes the first development of a sophisticated pressure measurement technique for a full-scale propeller and the success of the measurement. The full-scale measurements were carried out twice on the training ship “seiun-maru” equipped with a conventional propeller and a highly skewed propeller. The measured pressure distributions were similar at each propeller loading condition, except cavitation regions. These are compared with those computed by an existing lifting surface theory employing the estimated nominal wake distribution. For the conventional propeller, excellent agreements with theory were found at most of the measurement points on the backside. For the highly skewed propeller, good agreements of the pressure distribution between the measurements and the theory were observed at the inner region from 70% radial position, while at 90% radial position the measured pressure tends to lower toward the trailing edge and completely differs from the theory. The present full-scale measurements indicated that there still remain some problems to ·be improved on the lifting surface theory, especially for a highly skewed propeller.