Blade Analysis for Propellers

Quite often our users want to use a para­met­ric CAESES® model and fit this model into their existing geome­tries. They import the geometry data using either a common CAD format (STEP, PARA­SOLID,..) or some pro­pri­etary format, and then they start fitting their CAESES® model into the imported data by changing the model para­me­ters. In most cases, this is a manual or semi-auto­mated process where the para­me­ters are set in a way such that the error (least squares etc.) gets min­i­mized. After this fitting step, a user would typ­i­cally try to optimize the geometry shape further, using the fitted model as the baseline design.

At FRIEND­SHIP SYTEMS, we work on gen­er­al­ized concepts, to fit any CAESES® model to suitable data. It’s quite a chal­lenge to come up with a single solution for this, that’s for sure. And, of course, you cannot ​“easily” fit some given ship hull data into a F1 race car model, so the com­bi­na­tion needs to make some kind of sense ;-) However, we have solved these fitting tasks several times for indi­vid­ual appli­ca­tions so that we have gained a lot of expe­ri­ence with this (see this case study for an example where we fitted a para­met­ric CAESES® turbine blade into existing 3D blade sections). If one con­sid­ers a specific appli­ca­tion such as the turbine blade or a maritime pro­peller blade, it is much easier to offer a ​“gen­er­al­ized” method for all incoming geome­tries. So let’s take a look at the pro­peller blade: 

Blade Analysis

For maritime pro­pellers, we have a nice and easy-to-use func­tion­al­ity in place that is called blade analysis: From a set of imported blade surfaces, you can imme­di­ately generate a fully-para­met­ric pro­peller model — with a single click! This method auto­mat­i­cally creates all the relevant radial dis­tri­b­u­tions for chord, camber, thick­ness, rake, skew and pitch. With these func­tions, CAESES® sets up a para­met­ric blade model plus a pro­peller object. The 3D sections and a con­ve­nient view of the 2D sections are also directly available.

The result of such an analysis is typ­i­cally used as input for a custom blade with indi­vid­ual profile def­i­n­i­tions. Since the char­ac­ter­is­tic dis­tri­b­u­tions are given, it takes only a couple of minutes to feed custom models with this infor­ma­tion. If you don’t need a specific model at all, then the gen­er­ated blade setup can be readily used as is.

We think that a huge benefit of this analysis is that you don’t have to go through the tedious process of manually fitting e.g. rake, skew and pitch func­tions — this is really a boring task (the author has some expe­ri­ence with this). The analysis directly gives you these func­tions. Just a few seconds instead of hours…

Check out this short video from our tutorial section which demon­strates the blade analysis — we hope you’ll like it: 

More Infor­ma­tion

This blade analysis is part of the blade add-on of our CAESES® pro edition. Feel free to get in touch with us if you need more infor­ma­tion. Here is another blog post that copes with com­par­i­son of blade profiles. If you are inter­ested in trying out CAESES® for your own appli­ca­tion then check out our product pages for more amazing details. We offer a powerful & free edition of CAESES®, which can be down­loaded from our website. There are no annoying or hidden lim­i­ta­tions, and you can directly start to set up your own intel­li­gent model today! 

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