Design Opti­miza­tion of Pro­peller Boss Cap Fins

There is a lot of research going on to further improve the effi­ciency of ships by lowering the overall energy con­sump­tion. Besides the opti­miza­tion of the oper­a­tional profile of the ships (speed, trim, loading etc.), there are many things you can do to achieve more effi­cient ship designs in an early design stage. Typical can­di­dates are opti­miz­ing the hull shape itself, and the propeller(s) that generate the thrust for the vessel. Another inter­est­ing com­po­nent in this context are so-called pro­peller boss cap fins (PBCF): PBCFs are an energy saving device (ESD) that can enhance pro­peller effi­ciency, thus requir­ing less power to propel the vessel forward at a certain speed. The primary function of PBCF is to improve the pro­peller per­for­mance char­ac­ter­is­tics. This is done e.g. by min­i­miz­ing the hub vortex and the result­ing rudder cavitation.

There is an impres­sive research project from the Uni­ver­sity of Strath­clyde on this topic where a novel full scale PBCF design opti­miza­tion approach was inves­ti­gated. In this work, CAESES® was used to control the entire opti­miza­tion process, to inte­grate STAR-CCM+, as well as to auto­mat­i­cally generate new geome­tries from a para­met­ric PBCF model. The various geo­met­ric design can­di­dates were run in uniform flow con­di­tion using Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equa­tions to simulate open water tests. With this analysis, one can predict the ESD impact on the propul­sive effi­ciency. Finally, the overall idea is to find the global optimum of PBCF designs. If you are inter­ested in this topic, we can highly rec­om­mend to go through this inter­est­ing and detailed paper.

Thanks to Kurt Mizzi from the Uni­ver­sity of Strath­clyde for pro­vid­ing this material :-) Kurt is one of the authors of the work ​“Design Opti­mi­sa­tion of Pro­peller Boss Cap Fins for Enhanced Pro­peller Performance”. 

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