Fluid-structure interaction studies on marine propeller

Composite propellers offer high damping characteristics and corrosion resistance when compared with metal propellers. But the design of a hybrid composite propeller with the same strength of metal propeller is the critical task. For this purpose, the present paper focusses on fluid-structure interaction analysis of hybrid composite propeller with Carbon/Epoxy, R-Glass/Epoxy and S2-Glass/Epoxy to find its strength at the same operating conditions of the baseline aluminium propeller. The surface and solid models of the hybrid composite propeller are modelled using modelling software (CATIA) and these models are imported into mesh generation software (Hypermesh) to generate the surface mesh and solid mesh respectively. This surface model of the hybrid composite propeller is imported into computational fluid dynamics software (Fluent) to estimate the pressure loads on propeller blades. These pressure loads from Fluent are imported into FEA software (Abaqus) and applied on the propeller to find the deformation and strength of hybrid composite propeller due to fluid-structure interaction loads. Optimization study is carried out on hybrid composite propeller with different layup sequences of Carbon/R-Glass/S2-Glass to find the optimum strength. From the optimization study, it is found that the hybrid composite propeller with layup-3 of 55/55/90/0/0/90/450/90/ 0/90/45/90/45/90/0/90/0 degrees generates the least stress compared with other layups for the same pressure load obtained from fluid flow simulations. Damage initiation analysis is also carried out on hybrid composite propeller with optimized layup-3 based on Hashin damage criteria and found that the design is safe.