Modeling and Analysis of Container-Type Ship's Marine Propeller for Engine Load Conditions

Engine room simulators have become increasingly important in practical marine engineering training and education. To ensure their usefulness in both training and academic studies, it is essential to accurately model, simulate, and validate ship propulsion systems within these simulators. This study outlines the design and development of a marine propeller and its hydrodynamic performance analysis using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). To obtain sampled ship and propulsion parameters, a large container-type vessel model in an existing engine room simulator was employed. This study includes the design and development of a new efficient propeller and its propulsion data, which can be used in the development of an engine room simulator. This study demonstrates a methodology for developing training simulators that involve using complex and extensive mathematical modeling. The ship's geometry was designed using 3D modeling software such as Rhinoceros and Maxsurf. To determine the required thrust at each of the main engine's loading modes, the ship's resistance computations were conducted using Maxsurf's HullSpeed module. The authors also developed a MATLAB code to obtain the ship's power requirements. The ship resistance and thrust requirements data were then used as input to design the propeller, and CFD analyses were conducted for the defined engine load conditions. The hydrodynamic performance coefficients of the newly designed propeller were computed, and the CFD results were compared with the existing propeller's performance data. The resulting propulsion data presents the performance parameters for each predefined engine load condition. The analysis demonstrated that a more efficient marine propeller was designed, providing more thrust (up to 9% for a specific mode) while consuming less power compared with the existing one.