Numerical Simulation of Marine Propeller Hydrodynamic Performance in Uniform Inflow with Different Turbulence Models

Abstract

In general, marine propellers have complicated geometries and as a consequence complicated flow around propeller. The aim of this work is to find an appropriate method and assess the turbulence model to approach the open water hydrodynamic characteristics of the marine propellers. In this work, a numerical modeling using a finite volume commercial code (FVM) for different turbulence models has been applied on the well known conventional screw propeller DTRC P4119. The 3-D solid model of P4119 is established using pro/E software and for the mesh generation ANSYS-ICEM has been used. Steady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations are accomplished using FLUENT software with unstructured mesh in the rotating computational domain and structured mesh for the rest of the domain. The open water performance coefficients, thrust (KT), torque (KQ) and efficiency (η) have been calculated and compared with available experimental data to assess the applicability of different turbulence models for the open water study of propeller. This paper shows that, the accuracy of the CFD based on RANS equations is dependent on the used turbulence model and the RNG K-epsilon turbulence model yields to provide the most accurate results. Also, all the turbulence models via FLUENT software behave the same behavior for the total span of the advance coefficient (J) with two types of result accuracy. All the turbulence models shows high accuracy at low advance coefficient and this accuracy decreases but with an acceptable error till it decreases suddenly at the maximum advance coefficient.