Proposal for Improvement in Prediction of Marine Propeller Performance Using Vortex Lattice Method

Abstract

Current trends in propeller design have led to the need for extremely complex blade shapes, which place great demands on the accuracy of design and analysis methods. This paper presents a new proposal for improving the prediction of propeller performance with a vortex lattice method using the lifting surface theory. The paper presents a review of the theory and a description of the numerical methods employed. For 8 different propellers, the open water characteristics are calculated and compared with experimental data. The results are in good agreement in the region of a high advanced velocity, but there are differences in the other case. We have corrected the parameters for the trailing wake modeling in this paper, and repeated the calculation. The new calculation results are more in agreement with the experimental data.