Performance Predicton And Optimal Design Of Marine Composite Propellers

In recent years, composite propeller, as a new type of propulsion ofbetter acoustic performance, lighter weight and unique design ability,gaining eyes from naval and civil ships. However, as a result of lowerstiffness, its deformation cannot be neglected in analysis ofhydrodynamic performance, thus it’s a hot and difficult point inperformance prediction and optimal design of composite propeller.Most of the researches on composite propeller have been focus onpropeller made of unidirectional fibers and the researches on plain-wovenfibers are quite few, the influence of fiber volume is neglected andmethod of performance analysis is not introduced.The structural characteristics of the plain-woven composite propellerare analyzed, a tools is developed to parametrical model compositepropeller and predict hydrodynamic performance based on coupled liftingsurface method and FEM method. Based on propeller design theory, thetool is utilized with a3-level optimal design method to achieve theoptimal design of composite propeller. The details are as follows:The model method of composite propeller is detailed introduce andthe method validity is verified with a test. The difference between unidirectional fiber propeller and plain-woven propeller is revealed by astructural analysis of the two material composite propeller, resultsshowed that the deformation of plain-woven composite propeller shouldbe taken into accounts in performance prediction.Based on coupled VLM/FEM and utilizing MATLAB, a toolpredicting steady-water performance is developed, the developingprocedure and method is detailed introduced and the accuracy of the toolis verified by comparing with the results in paper[9].The tool is utilized with a3-level optimal design method,1stthe pliesorientation is optimized,2ndthe fiber volume is optimized,3rdthepre-deformed design is applied to accomplish the optimized thehydrodynamic performance and weight of composite propeller.