A Comparison of Physical and Numerical Modeling of Homogenous Isotropic Propeller Blades

Results of the fluid-structure co-simulations that were carried out as part of the FleksProp project are presented. The FleksProp project aims to establish better design procedures that take into account the hydroelastic behavior of marine propellers and thrusters. Part of the project is devoted to establishing good validation cases for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulations. More specifically, this paper describes the comparison of the numerical computations carried out on three propeller designs that were produced in both a metal and resin variant. The metal version could practically be considered rigid in model scale, while the resin variant would show measurable deformations. Both variants were then tested in open water condition at SINTEF Ocean’s towing tank. The tests were carried out at different propeller rotational speeds, advance coefficients, and pitch settings. The computations were carried out using the commercial software STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus. This paper describes briefly the experimental setup and focuses on the numerical setup and the discussion of the results. The simulations agreed well with the experiments; hence, the computational approach has been validated.