Fully Unstructured Mesh based Computation of Viscous Flow around Marine Propellers

A CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis is presented to predict hydrodynamic characteristics of a marine propeller. A commercial RANS(Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equation) solver, namely FLUENT, is utilized in conjunction with fully unstructured meshes around rotating propeller. Mesh generation process is greatly accelerated by using fully unstructured meshes composed of both isotropic and anisotropic tetrahedral elements. The anisotropic tetrahedral elements were used in the flow domain near the blade and shaft, where the viscous effect is important, having complex shape yet resolving the thin boundary layers. For other regions, isotropic tetrahedral elements are utilized. Two different approaches simulating rotational effect of the propeller are employed, namely Moving reference frame technique for steady simulation, and Sliding mesh technique for unsteady simulation. Both approaches are applied to the propeller open water (POW) test simulation. The current results, which are thrust and torque coefficients, are compared with available experimental data.