Research Of Fluid-structure Interaction On A Composite Propeller

With the rapid development of composite materials market throughout the world,marine composite material propeller has attracted more and more attention. Moreover,there is huge space to develop for the design methods of composite material propeller,with respect to the propellers of metal material. In this paper, Finite Element Methodand Computational Fluid Dynamics (called as CFD for short) are both used to analysisthe impact of the propeller performance using composite materials and how to takeadvantage of composite materials to further enhance the performance of the marinepropellers.Besides, compared with the conventional propulsion propeller, the poddedpropeller has many advantages in terms of ship design, manufacture and maintenance,etc. In this article, the study subject is a podded propeller with four blades. First of all,the hydrodynamic performance of the podded propeller is simulated in the commercialsoftware-ANSYS-CFX. Since the calculation result with shear stress transport (SST)turbulence model is most consistent with the experimental data and the error is thesmallest among three different common turbulence models, so SST turbulence model isselected in the following calculation.And in order to test the impact of the pod unit on the podded propeller, this paperdo researches on propeller with a pod unit specifically for the hydrodynamicperformance of the propeller. The study shows that the pod body affects little onhydrodynamic performance of the propeller.Then, ANSYS-Workbench is taken for the metal propeller with two-wayfluid-structure interaction simulation. Iterative coupling analysis is calculated on thisplatform through the structural module and the fluid module at each time step. Thecopper alloy propeller is simulated on ANSYS-Workbench and it turns out that a smalldeformation is generated. In addition，the maximum deformation is12.3mm. The resultalso indicates that the small deformation could be negligible.At last, the main focus is on the composite material propeller that is simulated intwo-way fluid-structure interaction simulation. In the paper, ANSYS-ACP module buildcomposite propeller entity model. And deformation of the composite material propeller in two-way fluid-structure interaction methods is calculated by ANSYS. As a result, themaximum deformation of the blades is on the hip, which is36.147mm. And through thepost processing, it can be found that the composite material propeller does not appearthe phenomenon of stress concentration, on the other words, stress distribution is moredispersed. This also shows the advantage of the anisotropic composite materials.