A very interesting topic in naval architecture is the choice of propeller. The engineer team should pay attention to several characteristics of the vessel to choose properly the most effective propeller for that specific application.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the diagrams of a well-known propeller design were published, the B-Series Propellers. They were tested at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in Wageningen and analyzed with multiple polynomial regression analysis. Until today this propeller is studied because it possesses satisfactory efficiency and adequate cavitation properties. Besides that, open-water characteristics (KT, KQ and η0) are easy to get.
The purpose of this work is to evaluate the usefulness of CFD analysis to get the main characteristics of a propeller in order to make this selected process more effective, as long as with a lower cost is possible to analyze much more designs of propellers at a lower cost. A tool using Microsoft Excel was developed to draw any B-Series propeller. For this work was used a specific B-Series propeller, the B3.80. The CFD results are verified using Richardson Extrapolation and then validated against the propeller model results. The open-water characteristics are used for this purpose and the numerical results showed a fairly good agreement with the experimental data. Other interesting results of this propeller are shown too, e.g. the pressure distribution, streamlines and wall y+.
