Blade section design of marine propellers with maximum cavitation inception speed

Kuiper and Jessup (1993) developed a design method for propellers in a wake based on the Eppler foil design method. The optimized section is transformed into the three-dimensional propeller flow using the approach of the effective blade sections. Effective blade sections are two-dimensional sections in two-dimensional flow which have the same chordwise loading distribution as the three-dimensional blade sections of a propeller. However, the design procedure is laborious in two aspects: finding an optimum blade section using the Eppler program requires much skill of the designer, and transforming the two-dimensional blade section into a propeller blade section in three-dimensional flow is complex. In this work, these two problems were coped with. A blade section design procedure was presented using an optimization technique and an alternative procedure for the effective blade section is developed using a lifting surface design method. To validate the method a benchmark model of a naval ship was used. This benchmark model was extended by new appendices and a reference propeller, and designed using conventional design methods. This reference propeller was optimized using the new design procedure and model tests were carried out. Special attention was given to the data of the model and the reference propeller, to make the configuration suitable for the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) calculations.