Abstract
This paper discusses the application of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to cavitating flow around marine propellers operating in the ship wake. Emphasis was put especially on the tip vortex cavitation and the erosive cavitation around the trailing edge.
This research found that adaptive mesh refinement methodology is effective for improving the resolution of tip vortex cavitation. Next, Full cavitation model(Singhal et al. 2002) was validated, and it showeda qualitative agreement with experimental results.
Finally, four simple cavitation erosion indexes were applied to estimate erosion risk.One index showed good agreement with experimental results. It is concluded that the RANS (Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes) CFD provides valuable information for judging erosion risks although its presumption’s accuracy and numerical stability need to be improved.
