---

In this study hydrodynamics and noise behavior of a marine propeller is analyzed through numerical and experimental methods. In order to find out the conditions of initiation and development of cavitation, numerical analysis is carried out through finite volume method (FVM) for various rotational velocities. Moreover, hydrodynamics of the propeller is tested in the cavitation tunnel and the results are compared against numerical simulations. Second, the flow results obtained in the first step were used as the input to extract the sound pressure levels (SPLs) in the Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings (FW-H) formulation, to predict the far field noise. In addition, the behavior of the obtained SPL was studied and a good agreement was observed between our data and the previous works results. Similarly, experimental results collected from two hydrophones are compared with numerical simulations. In this case, cavitation is initiated and developed by either increasing the propeller’s rotational velocity in fixed pressure or dropping pressure while keeping the velocity constant. The signals registered at the two hydrophones are then filtered within one-third octave bands. The outcomes demonstrate a negligible deviation between numerical and experimental results for both noise and hydrodynamics tests.

---

Because of various applications of UAVs, research in this field has been developed increasingly in recent years. Propeller has considerable importance as a key factor in producing propulsion in such vehicles. Having information about a propeller’s performance variations in different operational conditions is very important in order to choose a suitable propeller for a predefined mission of the flying vehicle. For this aim, in this research a test stand was designed and fabricated to evaluate the static performance of electromotor driven propellers with application in UAVs. After collecting data by performing experimental tests, the results were compared to those obtained from the numerical and analytical techniques. In order to verify the results, a propeller was modeled and a computational method was applied based on k-ε, RNG turbulence model. The comparison of experimental, analytical and computational results shows an acceptable agreement between them. According to the results, the difference between analytical and empirical results is 0.4%, the difference between computational and empirical results is 0.3% and the difference between analytical and computational results is about 1.23%. Also in the range of the rotational speed of the propeller, the difference between computational and empirical results became less than 10% in most cases, implying the validity of the applied computational method and correctness of experimental test procedure.

---

Variable pitch propeller (VPP) are used in advanced helicopters, in order to achieve greater efficiency, better stability and achieve higher altitudes. This study is going to assess the behavior of VPP propeller with coupled non-linear displacement in three degrees of freedom. Accordingly, the behavior of this type of propeller with Changes of elastic axis distance, Length, mass, speed, polar radius of gyration, Stiffness in three degrees of freedom, and pitch have been investigated. In this paper, Gallerkin method is used to extract natural frequencies and the results were evaluated with the results reported by other researchers. The results show convergence and accuracy of the used method. In this study, it was found that parameters of mass, length and rotational speed of the propeller have effect on the natural frequencies, and all modes of vibration. However, other parameters except for the pitch angle effect on the odd or even number of frequency modes. It was also found that the pitch angle in the static mode does not effect on natural frequencies but in the case of rotation of propeller, affect on natural frequency of vibration modes as sine or cosine form.

---

Simulation of the flow around propeller is a complex fluid flow problem, especially when the propeller is closed to free surface. In this study, the effect of immersion depth, advance velocity and the ventilation phenomenon on the performance of a B-Wageningen series propeller close to surface of water have been numerically investigated. For this purpose the ANSYS-FLUENT commercial software has been used to solve the viscous, incompressible and two phase flow field. The rotation of the propeller has been implemented using the rotating reference frame model in steady state and the sliding mesh for unsteady flow. For turbulent flow modeling and free surface simulation, the k-ω SST model and the volume of fluid method have been used, respectively. For validation of numerical results due to lack of access to experimental results of propeller close to surface, numerical solution in open water condition have been performed and performance coefficients have been calculated. Comparing the numerical results with the experiment ones, shows good agreement and confirms results of numerical simulation. The results of the numerical solution show that the submergence ratio and ventilation phenomenon affect the performance of propeller so that by reducing submergence ratio from 2.2 to 1.4 in advance ratio J=0.4, ratio of thrust and torsional moment coefficients to open water performance coefficients reduced to 7.7% and 6%, respectively.

---

This work aims to prediction of laminar/turbulent transition which plays an important role on aerodynamics of wing section. In this respect the flow around the NACA2415 airfoil simulated in a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver in different regimes with and without propeller flowfield. For predicting the transition onset, two approaches were used: The first is based on time history of the skin-friction coefficient for determining the transition onset and the transition length on the airfoil. The second is to apply transition γ-〖Re〗_θ model for laminar/turbulent transition simulation. For investigation of transition effect, the simulation repeated by use of a classical turbulent model and both results was compared with experimental data. The comparison shows that taking into account the transition effects gives a good agreement with experiment. Relative error of calculated drag coefficients for the transition based simulation is lower than 10%, while fully turbulent simulation are 70% overestimated in some incidences. Slipstream of upstream propeller changes flow pattern and boundary layer characteristics over the wing. Indeed in presence of propeller, spanwise load distribution and laminar/turbulent transition onset were affected. In propeller flowfield, increasing of velocity normal component over wing surface causes transition delay. Movement of transition onset to trailing edge on the upper surface in propeller downwash is representative of such phenomenon. On the other hand, in upwash region, the transition onset moves upstream. With the increasing propeller rotational speed, this tendency augments and so the transition onset on the wing upper surface moves far downstream in propeller downwash.

---

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.

---

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.

---