Blade Section Design of Marine Propellers with Minimum Cavitation Induced Pressure Fluctuations

To minimize cavitation induced pressure fluctuations by marine propellers with minimum efficiency loss, the paper presents a new design and optimization method using a blade section design method. The sheet cavity volume variation on a two-dimensional blade section in quasi-steady condition has been simplified to a relation with only a limited number of non-dimensional parameters. This results in a fast prediction method of the cavity volume of a blade section passing a wake peak, using a pre-calculated database. This makes optimization feasible. The optimization method was applied to the propeller of a container ship. Extensive tests in a towing tank and a cavitation channel validated the reduction of pressure fluctuations: 33% reduction in the first blade frequency amplitude and 18% reduction in the second blade frequency amplitude, with the same open water efficiency.