Hydro-elastic analysis of marine propellers based on a BEM-FEM coupled FSI algorithm

ABSTRACTA reliable steady/transient hydro-elastic analysis is developed for flexible (composite) marine propeller blade design which deforms according to its environmental load (ship speed, revolution speed, wake distribution, etc.) Hydro-elastic analysis based on CFD and FEM has been widely used in the engineering field because of its accurate results however it takes large computation time to apply early propeller design stage. Therefore the analysis based on a boundary element method-Finite Element Method (BEM-FEM) Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) is introduced for computational efficiency and accuracy. The steady FSI analysis, and its application to reverse engineering, is designed for use regarding optimum geometry and ply stack design. A time domain two-way coupled transient FSI analysis is developed by considering the hydrodynamic damping ffects of added mass due to fluid around the propeller blade. The analysis makes possible to evaluate blade strength and also enable to do risk assessment by estimating the change in performance and the deformation depending on blade position in the ship's wake. To validate this hydro-elastic analysis methodology, published model test results of P5479 and P5475 are applied to verify the steady and the transient FSI analysis, respectively. As the results, the proposed steady and unsteady analysis methodology gives sufficient accuracy to apply flexible marine propeller design.