Computational Analysis of Cavitation Structures on a Ship Propeller

Cavitation phenomenon is an unpredictable issue and intriguing subject in fluid dynamics and the investigation of cavitation structures around a ship propeller in a cavitation water tunnel for experimentation is a very complicated and consumes lot of time. In the present paper the consequences of cavitation structures at design and off design testing conditions are predicted by utilizing RANS equations in ANSYS CFX. A complete three dimensional ship propeller is demonstrated to simulate cavitation on screw propeller. From the literature, it is evident that, the most severe off design operating conditions is not accurately anticipated. In this paper computational analysis were carried out on various cavitation numbers at both designed and off designing conditions, to validate the experimental results. From these results, we have observed that, cavitating structures, and tip vortex formation on the blades were observed with good accuracy by competing with experimental results.