Predicting the cavitating marine propeller noise at design stage: A deep learning based approach

Abstract The importance of reducing the noise impact of ships is being recognised worldwide. Consequently, the inclusion of this principle among the objectives and constraints of new designs is becoming a standard. For this reason, considerable attention is given to the propeller being often the dominant source of underwater radiated noise, especially when cavitation occurs, as it happens in most cases when a ship sails at design speed. The designers of quieter propulsion systems require the availability of predictive tools able to verify the compliance with noise requirements and to compare the effectiveness of different design solutions. In this context, tools able to provide a reliable estimate of propeller noise spectra based just on the information available during propeller design represent a fundamental tool to speed up the design process avoiding model scale tests. This work focuses on developing a tool able to predict the cavitating marine propeller generated noise spectra at design stage exploiting the most recent advances in Deep Learning, able to take advantage of both structured and unstructured data, and in hybrid modelling, able to exploit both data and physical knowledge about the problem. For this purpose authors will make use of a dataset collected by means of dedicated model scale measurements in a cavitation tunnel combined with the detailed flow characterisation obtainable by calculations carried out with a Boundary Element Method. The performance of the proposed approaches are analysed considering different scenarios and different definitions of the input and output variable used during the modelisation.