Propeller Cavitation Noise Radiated from Single and Twin-Screw Cargo Liners: CFD Prediction and Full Scale Validation

Present study is dedicated to estimate sound pressure level (SPL) radiated from cavitating marine propellers equipped on two different cargo liners by means of viscous computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Since limited kind of model tests were carried out for the target ships, flow configurations (e.g. full scale ship wake, thrust coefficient and cavitation number) were estimated via CFD and full scale sea trial data. Estimated configurations are utilized to carry out CFD simulations of cavitating propellers. The estimated SPL were validated against full scale data which were measured according to ISO standard. It is encouraging that estimated SPL by the present CFD agree well to the full scale measurements up to 900Hz. This evidences that 1) the flow configurations estimated by the present CFD are adequate enough to reproduce cavitation condition, and 2) assumption of “near field acoustic pressure can be approximated by near field hydrodynamic pressure” is likely to be appropriate.