Outboard Marine Propeller Performance Analysis through CFD Modelling

Marine propellers are a critical element in the marine transportation propulsion system. The propeller performances are defined by their non-dimensional coefficient such as the thrust coefficient, the torque coefficient and the efficiency. This paper demonstrate the utilization of modern computer aided engineering and computational fluid dynamic application tools (SolidWorks) to provide a preliminary understanding of the propeller performance characteristics. Four types of highly skewed commercial marine propellers with pitch variance (6.5", 9.75", 10.5" and 12") were subjected to computational flow analysis based on Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes equation. The thrust and torque coefficients were linearly decreasing with increasing advance coefficient for each propeller type under different rotational speeds. High pitch value had also shown to greatly enhance the efficiency coefficient of the propeller, and thus the performance.