Numerical modeling of a hydrofoil or a marine propeller undergoing unsteady motion via a panel method and RANS

• Main Author: Sharma, Abhinav, master of science in civil engineering
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Heaving and pitching hydrofoil; Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) solver; Vortex-lattice method (VLM); Boundary element method (BEM)
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2011-12-4830

A computational approach to analyze the hydrodynamic performance of a hydrofoil or a marine propeller undergoing unsteady motion has been developed. In order to simulate heave and pitch motion of a hydrofoil, an unsteady boundary element method based modeling is performed. The wake of the hydrofoil is modeled by a continuous dipole sheet and determined in time by applying a force-free condition on its surface. An explicit vortex core model is adapted in this model to capture the rolling up shape and to avoid instability due to roll-up deformation of the wake. The numerical results of the developed model are compared with analytical results and those from the commercial Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes solver (ANSYS/FLUENT). The results show close level of agreement with each other. The problem of flow around a marine propeller performing surge, roll and heave motion in an unbounded fluid is formulated and solved using both a vortex-lattice method and a boundary element method. A fully unsteady wake alignment algorithm is implemented into the vortex-lattice method in order to satisfy the force-free condition on the propeller wake surface. Finally, a comparative study of transient propeller forces on a propeller blade obtained from BEM and VLM (with or without fully aligned wake) is carried out and results are presented. In some cases, results from the presented methods are compared with those from RANS or other numerical methods available in the literature. === text