Numerical Simulation of the Unsteady Wake Flow around a Marine Propeller Using URANS Model

The flow field investigation around marine propellers is of great importance, due to its applications in vessels identification and hydrodynamic noise prediction. In the present research, the steady and unsteady wake flow field was simulated using the open-source OpenFOAM software and the simple-Foam and Pimple-DyMFoam solvers. The obtained characteristic chart and near propeller wake flow results were validated against available experimental data, which shown to be in a very good agreement. The grid study results in the wake region prove that unlike global quantities, the employed wake grid strongly affects the wake parameters. The results obtained from the present research show that employing the RANS models are suitable for the hydrodynamic coefficients calculation and these models predict the results with a low computational cost against the Unsteady RANS approach. On the other hand, an accurate investigation of the flow fluctuations and the vortex flow instabilities can only be accrued performing unsteady simulations with an appropriate refined grid. In this research, the effect of advance coefficient is also investigated on the vortex flow pattern in the wake region. Qualitative comparison of the obtained results and similar available data of the more accurate DES turbulence model shows that the URANS method has great capabilities in wake flow simulation provided that a suitable grid is applied. This method significantly decreases the required cells number and run time while maintaining the results accuracy.