Hydrodynamic and Hydroacoustic Computational Prediction of Conventional and Highly Skewed Marine Propellers Operating in Non-uniform Ship Wake

Abstract

Despite their high manufacturing cost and structural deficiencies especially in tip regions, highly skewed propellers are preferred in the marine industry, where underwater noise is a significant design criterion. However, hydrodynamic performances should also be considered before a decision to use these propellers is made. This study investigates the trade-off between hydrodynamic and hydroacoustic performances by comparing conventional and highly skewed Seiun Maru marine propellers for a noncavitating case. Many papers in the literature focus solely on hydroacoustic calculations for the open-water case. However, propulsive characteristics are significantly different when propeller-hull interactions take place. Changes in propulsion performance also reflect on the hydroacoustic performances of the propeller. In this study, propeller-hull interactions were considered to calculate the noise spectra. Rather than solving the full case, which is computationally demanding, an indirect approach was adopted; axial velocities from the nominal ship wake were introduced as the inlet condition of the numerical approach. A hybrid method based on the acoustic analogy was used in coupling computational fluid dynamics techniques with acoustic propagation methods, implementing the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FW-H) equation. The hydrodynamic performances of both propellers were presented as a preliminary study. Propeller-hull interactions were included in calculations after observing good accordance between our results, experiments, and quasi-continuous method for the open-water case. With the use of the time-dependent flow field data of the propeller behind a non-uniform ship wake as an input, simulation results were used to solve the FW-H equation to extract acoustic pressure and sound pressure levels for several hydrophones located in the near field. Noise spectra results confirm that the highest values of the sound pressure levels are in the low-frequency range and the first harmonics calculated by the present method are in good accordance with the theoretical values. Results also show that a highly skewed propeller generates less noise even in noncavitating cases despite a small reduction in hydrodynamic efficiency.

Keywords

Seiun Maru / Moving reference frame / Underwater acoustics / Underwater noise / Sound pressure level / Blade passing frequency / FW-H equation / Hydrophones

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