Simulation of Unsteady Propeller Blade Loads Using OpenFOAM

Other conference contribution, 2013

Unsteady propeller blade loads are important to consider in the design of the propulsion system in order to avoid problems with noise and vibrations. This is normally done through an analysis of the average wake field flowing into the propulsor in order to correctly match the different components of the propulsion system. As computational resources increase, it now starts to become possible to better study the impact on the natural wake flow unsteadiness and how this influences the behaviour of the propeller. This work is a feasibility study to investigate different computational aspects regarding the flow around a propeller operating in a ship wake. The simulations are performed in OpenFOAM 2.2.x using LES, Large Eddy Simulation.The interest concerns both how the sliding mesh implementation in OpenFOAM performs and how large variation in the propeller flow that the resolved transient wake field incurs.