Detrmination of Hydrodynamics Characteristics of Marine Propeller Using Hydroelastic Analysis

Professional paper The paper presents a method based on hydro-elastic analysis to determine the hydrodynamics characteristics of a marine propeller using a hybrid BEM-FEM software code. In the method, the hydrodynamic load acted on the propeller is determined by a BEM code and the deformed propel-ler is then obtained by an FEM code in every step. The iterations between the BEM and FEM are repeated till the defl ection and hydrodynamic characteristics (thrust, torque and effi ciency) of the propeller are converged. The effects of skew angle on the performance of a composite propeller are also studied. As the skew angle increases, the maximum defl ection of blade increases, how-ever, thrust and torque coeffi cients decrease. Additionally, a copper high tensile brass propeller is analyzed and the results are compared to the composite one