Effect of the blade number on the marine propeller performance

This paper deals with numerical simulation of stationary flow around a marine propeller. The aim is to reproduce the hydrodynamic turbulent flow around the Wageningen B serie propellers in open water using the ANSYS FLUENT code and the RANS approach. The computational domain consists of an inter-blade channel with periodic boundaries, meshed with tetrahedral cells. The turbulence is modeled with the k-ω. The obtained results provide good agreement with the available experimental data and show that the blades number affects considerably the marine propellers performances. It is interesting to notice that the six blades propeller is the best adapted one for the open water flows. Key words: Marine propeller / Wageningen B series / CFD simulation / RANS