Comparison of uRANS and BEM-BEM for propeller pressure pulse prediction - E779A propeller in a cavitation tunnel

Studying pressure fluctuations from marine propellers is important when hull fatigue and comfort onboard are of interest. While potential flow tools, based on boundary element methods (BEM), are still commonplace for propeller design, viscous flow codes, solving the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes (uRANS) equations, are nowadays mature enough to study cavitation, as well as pressure pulses. This work is a deeper investigation of the wetted and cavitating flow around the INSEAN E779A propeller in a cavitation tunnel as studied within the CRS SHARCS working group (Vaz et al., 2015). Previously, MARIN was only able to perform one wetted and one cavitating computation using the uRANS code ReFRESCO. In this paper, the sensitivity of such computations to timestep and turbulence model will be examined. In addition, further simulations using a BEM-BEM coupling of MARIN’s PROCAL and EXCALIBUR codes, will be presented and evaluated, including comparison to experimental data and results from a RANS-BEM-BEM coupling performed by DRDC during CRS SHARCS.