Strength assessment method of ice-class propeller under the design ice load condition

The strength assessment is the most important part at the design of ice-class propeller. Based on ice rules for ice-class propeller in IACS URI3 and FEM, the strength assessment method of ice-class propeller is established in this paper. To avoid the multifarious meshing process of propeller blade, an automatic meshing method has been developed by dividing the propeller geometry into a number of 8-node hexahedron elements along radial, chordwise and thickness directions, then the loaded areas in five cases can easily be calculated and identified. The static FEM is applied to calculate the stress and deformation of propeller blade. The fair agreements between the results of the present method and ANSYS/Workbench demonstrate its robust and the feasibility, and also the method is able to produce smooth gradient field. The blade stress and deformation distributions for five load cases are studied, and then the strength of the whole blade is checked. Keywords: Strength assessment, Ice-class propeller, Meshing method, Finite element method (FEM