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The flow field investigation around marine propellers is of great importance, due to its applications in vessels identification and hydrodynamic noise prediction. In the present research, the steady and unsteady wake flow field was simulated using the open-source OpenFOAM software and the simple-Foam and Pimple-DyMFoam solvers. The obtained characteristic chart and near propeller wake flow results were validated against available experimental data, which shown to be in a very good agreement. The grid study results in the wake region prove that unlike global quantities, the employed wake grid strongly affects the wake parameters. The results obtained from the present research show that employing the RANS models are suitable for the hydrodynamic coefficients calculation and these models predict the results with a low computational cost against the Unsteady RANS approach. On the other hand, an accurate investigation of the flow fluctuations and the vortex flow instabilities can only be accrued performing unsteady simulations with an appropriate refined grid. In this research, the effect of advance coefficient is also investigated on the vortex flow pattern in the wake region. Qualitative comparison of the obtained results and similar available data of the more accurate DES turbulence model shows that the URANS method has great capabilities in wake flow simulation provided that a suitable grid is applied. This method significantly decreases the required cells number and run time while maintaining the results accuracy.

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In the present research, numerical simulation of the characteristic chart and steady-state Wakefield flow around a marine propeller is conducted. Solutions were performed using the open-source OpenFOAM software and the steady incompressible simple-Foam solver. The gradients were calculated using the linear Gauss algorithm, and the pressure equation was solved with the multi-grid method. In this research, characteristic chart simulation of the propeller was carried out for the entire operational conditions and the effect of using Realizable-k-ε and k-ε-v^2-f turbulence models on the results was investigated. The results were found to be in good agreement in all conditions except for the near bollard region. In this region, the propeller inlet angle of attack severely increased, and the two equation model predicted the thrust coefficient with 24% error, while implementing the four equation model significantly developed the results and decreased the error to 5%. The wake region parameters were also investigated in the numerical simulations at different longitudinal and radial cross sections behind the propeller which showed good agreement compared with the available experimental data. Wake region investigation showed that the flow behavior in downstream cross sections is similar to the corresponding upstream section with smaller variation ranges and for the swirling flow behind the propeller, the maximum and minimum angular position of the wake components rotates. The obtained results also show that the wake axial velocity component deviation is extremely large at the blade tip.