VISCOUS-FLOW AROUND MARINE PROPELLERS USING BOUNDARY-LAYER STRIP THEORY

This paper presents a method to analyze the viscous flow around marine propellers using boundary-layer strip theory. A state-of-the-art two- dimensional boundary-layer formulation is coupled to a state-of-the-ar t perturbation potential panel method used in marine propeller flow an alysis. The coupling procedure is applied along strips of the blade wh ere two-dimensional boundary-layer flow is assumed. For this paper the se strips were assumed to be constant radial strips of the blade. The resulting method is applied to a conventional marine propeller and com parisons to experiments are given. Results include the global quantiti es of thrust, torque, and efficiency and the local strip quantities of displacement thickness and section drag coefficient. The resulting co mparisons, showing the applicability of the method to conventional mar ine propellers, are quite good.