Self-propulsion simulation of DARPA suboff

Hydrodynamic performance prediction of a propeller working behind a submerged body is a popular research field. For a submarine propeller, the propeller-hull interaction should be considered during the preliminary design stage. In this study, the resistance and propulsion analyses of the well-known bench-mark DARPA Suboff with E1619 propeller have been done using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. Self-propulsion of the submarine has been modeled with actuator disc based on body force method and with the propeller itself behind the submarine. The flow has been considered as 3-D, fully turbulent, in-compressible and steady, thus the governing equations (RANSE) have been discretized with finite volume method (FVM). Uncertainty analysis has also been carried out to determine the optimum cell number in terms of total resistance. The numerical results have been compared with the available experimental data. The ap-plicability of CFD method on self-propulsion performance prediction of the underwater vehicles has been dis-cussed.