On new screw propeller driven by a flexible shaft consisted of spheral gears and gimbals

Taking the new screw propeller driven by a flexible transmission shaft into consideration, some analytic work has been brought out on the relationship between its input and output motions with its math model. With the help of the CFD software FLUENT, the paper also presented some research work on the hydro-resistance force and pressure distribution of the propeller, which is set into three stances with a aberrancy of 0deg, 45deg, 90deg . Under each stance, three kinds of flow velocities were given, they were 0.5 m/s, 1 m/s, 2 m/s respectively. The hydrokinetic simulation showed the screw propeller driven by a controllable flexible had better hydrokinetics than the one driven by a traditional rigid shaft. A prototype was made and some experiments had been carried out to validate the motion and function of the new screw propeller.