A comparison of physical and numerical modeling of homogenous isotropic propeller blades

Results of the fluid-structure co-simulations that were
carried out as part of the FleksProp project are presented.
The FleksProp project aims to establish better
design procedures that take into account the hydroelastic
behavior of marine propellers and thrusters.
Part of the project is devoted to establishing good
validation cases for fluid-structure interaction (FSI)
simulations. More specifically this paper describes
the comparison of the numerical computations carried
out on three propeller designs that were produced in
both a metal and resin variant. The metal version
could practically be considered rigid in model scale,
while the resin variant would show measurable deformations.
Both variants were then tested in open water
condition at SINTEF Ocean’s towing tank. The tests
were carried out at different propeller rotational speed,
advance coefficients and pitch settings. The computations
were carried out using the commercial software
STAR-CCM+ and Abaqus. The paper describes
briefly the experimental setup and focuses on the numerical
setup and the discussion of the results. The
simulations agreed well with the experiments, hence
the computational approach has been validated.