Numerical and experimental study on the Duisburg Propeller Test Case

Understanding of cavitation behaviour on marine propellers is of critical importance to ship designers as it dictates several of the operating limits of the propulsor due to onset of increased erosion risk or unacceptable levels of noise and vibration. Consequently, this topic continues to inspire experimental studies aimed at providing a more in-depth understanding of the physical phenomena involved, but also to provide means of validation for numerical models. Unfortunately, many of these studies do not cover the complete spectrum of types of cavitating flows seen in practice on modern ship propellers and do not present uncertainties of the experimental data. Present work aims to address these issues by reporting on a new series of quantitative and qualitative model-scale propeller tests on the Duisburg Propeller Test Case (DPTC). The experimental data is then used to validate Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
predictions of open water performance and cavitation patterns and a verification and validation study is carried out.