Geometry for the Design of Wagenin­gen B‑Series Propellers

Some time ago we had a request from a pro­peller designer to come up with an easy-to-use para­met­ric geometry model in CAESES® for the Wagenin­gen B‑Series. There is a math­e­mat­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion pub­lished for setting up such a marine ship pro­peller with some inputs (e.g. area ratio, number of blades, pitch/​rake/​skew data as well as leading and trailing edge infor­ma­tion) to create a set of 2D profiles. These profiles are defined at specific radial loca­tions. In order to generate a para­met­ric blade surface from this radii-based infor­ma­tion, we wrapped every­thing up in a feature def­i­n­i­tion, trans­formed them into the 3D space using a cylin­dri­cal trans­for­ma­tion and finally skinned the 3D sections. The result is given in the fol­low­ing short demo video where some para­me­ters are changed interactively:

Online Pro­peller Tool

We have also released a new online pro­peller tool that gen­er­ates solid geometry for the Wagenin­gen B‑Series. This tool is based on CAESES® and comes with two dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties (web apps) to generate a pro­peller. The final geometry can be down­loaded as STL or STEP file. Check it out and — please don’t forget to leave your feedback there! 

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