Hydrodynamic and Acoustic Performance Analysis of Marine Propellers by Combination of Panel Method and FW-H Equations

Abstract

The noise emitted by ships is one of the most important noises in the ocean, and the propeller noise is one of the major components of the ship noise. Measuring the propeller noise in a laboratory, despite the high accuracy and good reliability, has high costs and is very time-consuming. For this reason, the calculation of propeller noise using numerical methods has been considered in recent years. In this study, the noise of a propeller in non-cavitating conditions is calculated by the combination of the panel method (boundary element method) and solving the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FW-H) equations. In this study, a panel method code is developed, and the results are validated by the experimental results of the model tests carried out in the cavitation tunnel of the Sharif University of Technology. Software for numerical calculation of propeller noise, based on FW-H equations, is also developed and the results are validated by experimental results. This study shows that the results of the panel method code have good agreement with experimental results, and that the maximum error of this code for the thrust and torque coefficients is 4% and 7%, respectively. The results of the FW-H noise code are also in good agreement with the experimental data.