Numerical investigation of full-scale cavitating propeller underwater radiated noise

This study aims to predict the full-scale propeller Underwater Radiated Noise (URN) in cavitating and non-uniform flow conditions using a viscous flow-based hybrid method. The recently introduced benchmark propeller of the research vessel, "The Princess Royal", was used for the numerical application to validate the methodology presented in this paper. The hybrid method constitutes a DES (Detached Eddy Simulation) solver coupled with a porous formulation of the Ffowcs Williams Hawking Equations (P-FWH) for the URN predictions. The Schnerr-Sauer cavitation model based on the reduced Rayleigh-Plesset equation was utilised to model the sheet and tip vortex cavitation (TVC). A vorticity-based Adaptive Mesh Refinement (V-AMR) technique was proposed and implemented for better modelling of the TVC in the propeller's slipstream. The hydrodynamic performance, including the cavity patterns and URN results, were compared with the full-scale URN data collected from the sea trials with The Princess Royal. The predicted propeller URN results show good agreement with the trials data except for some discrepancies in the high-frequency region of the noise spectra investigated.