Improvements in fatigue strength assessment of marine propellers

The importance of considering fatigue phenomena in propeller design is analysed by proposing a reviewed procedure for propeller blade fatigue assessment, already presented in a previous work. According to the results of fatigue tests collected from open literature and to fatigue design methodologies for propellers operating in ice, new corrections and coefficients are defined and introduced in the fatigue assessment. The reviewed procedure is applied to two different test cases. The analysis of the results underlines the importance of a more detailed and direct approach to propeller structural design which, at least in particular cases, could lead to benefits in the propeller performances