Natural Frequency Analysis of Cantilever Plates with Added Mass

The high-skewed and/or composite propellers of current interests to reduce the ship vibration and to increase the acoustic performance are likely to be exposed to the unexpected structural problems. One typical example is that the added mass effect on the propellers working in the non-uniform wake field reduces the natural frequency of the propeller leading to the resonance with the low-frequency excitation of the external forces. To avoid this resonance problem during the design stage, the technique of fluid-structure interaction has been developed, but the higher-order effect of the blade geometry deformation is not yet considered in evaluating the added mass effects. In this paper the fluid boundary-value problem is formulated by the potential-based panel method in the inviscid fluid region with the velocity inflow due to the body deformation, and the structural response of the solid body under the hydrodynamic loading is solved by applying the finite element method which implements the 20-node iso-parametric element model. The fluid-structure problem is solved iteratively. A basic fluid-sturcture interaction study is performed with the simple rectangular plates of thin thickness with various planform submerged in the water of infinite extent. The computations show good correlation with the experimental results of Linholm, et al. (1965).