A RANS code for flow simulation of marine propellers

A Reynolds Averaged Navier- Stokes (RANS) equations code is developed to simulate flow around marine propellers. A cell centred finite volume discretisation of the governing equation is used and to accelerate the convergence of iterative solver, an algebraic multigrid method is implemented. To solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on unstructured meshes a pressure correction method is employed. In this method, the momentum equations are solved initially with an assumed pressure field which is then iteratively updated using a pressure correction equation. The capability of the code is verified by simulation of flow over a four-bladed marine propeller. The length of the computational domain of the marine propeller is considered large enough to remove the effect of boundaries on the flow computation. The results of the numerical calculations for this case are compared with the experimental data to judge them on realistic flow patterns. The numerical solutions have shown reasonable agreement with the experimental data, particularly for marine propellers thrust and torque coefficients.