A study on Numerical Analysis of Controllable Pitch Propeller(CPP) using tunnel inspection AUV

Hanwha Research and Development Center has developed an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and is in process of developing an application of this AUV for tunnel inspection. The important performance of tunnel inspection AUV is reverse thrust because AUV should go out tunnel using reverse thrust as much distance as it has moved. To satisfy these conditions, tunnel inspection AUV uses Controllable pitch propeller (CPP) that can move blade pitch angle and change AUV´s direction without reversing the device. The CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis has a distinctive capability of operating optimum pitch angle without much help from experience. To describe the rotation of the blade, each propeller´s blades are used to transform the coordinates for Numerical Analysis of Controllable Pitch Propeller. In the process of coordinate transformation, numerical error is generated due to round off error. This paper presents a way to avoid numerical error by coordinate transformation with CFD analysis.