Manufacture and Testing of a Moderate Size Integrated Marine Composite Propeller

The composite material has high strength-to-weight, stiffness-to-weight ratios and it has the layer designing property to satisfy special mechanical requirement. Nowadays, the marine produce industry makes efforts to use composites for marine propeller to improve the hydrodynamic and structural performance. In this paper, the authors use FEA coupled CFD to design the layer sequence of composite propeller and develop ANSYS subroutine to simulate resin flow in the mould. The composite propeller is produced by RTM (resin transfer molding) and tested to measure the performance of composite propeller. Compared to the same size aluminum propeller, the composite propeller saves 39% weight and has less noise.