Numerical prediction of the performances of a non-cavitating propeller working in open water

The present study describes a 3D numerical simulation of the viscous flow around a five blade propeller model, as an intermediate step in developing a robust technique for a further investigation of the flow around a self-propelled ship hull. Several computations are performed by using either the FINETM/Marine component of the NUMECA suite, or the ANSYS CFX to estimate through the comparisons with the available experimental the level of accuracy of each of the two solvers. For the sake of similarity, in both cases the numerical simulation is based on the unsteady solution for the Reynolds-averaged NavierStokes (RANS hereafter) equations in which the turbulence is modeled with the k-ω SST model. The global hydrodynamic forces, moments and efficiency are computed for eight different advance coefficients to draw the open water diagram. A few introspections into the propeller freestream structure will be performed as well.