Advanced Methods for Partitioned Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulations Applied to Ship Propellers

Abstract In naval architecture, fluid-structure interaction is highly important for many applications. The accurate and fast computation of fluid-structure interaction problems is for this reason a major challenge for a simulation engineer working on flexible structures interacting with water and wind. For ship propellers, steel and metal alloy have long been the dominating choice of material. With the advancement in the development of fiber-reinforced polymers such as carbon fiber reinforced polymers the consideration of fluid-structure interaction for ship propellers becomes increasingly important. This work presents a partitioned coupled solution approach for the simulation of fluid-structure interaction problems on the example of a large ship propeller. The in-house developed software library comana is used as coupling manager together with the commercial finite element software ANSYS as structural solver and the boundary element method code panMARE as fluid solver. comana offers the possibility to couple a number of existing and highly specialized solvers to solve multifield problems. For partitioned coupled fluid-structure interaction problems the increased computational effort due to the necessary coupling iterations and possible instabilities due to the partitioned coupling should be reduced by suitable predictor and convergence acceleration methods. For convergence acceleration, the Aitken method is one of the most common choices even though Quasi-Newton methods such as the Quasi-Newton least-squares method show promising results for the acceleration of fluid-structure interaction simulations. The simulation of the dynamic structural behaviour of a ship propeller is introduced and the advantages and disadvantages of the partitioned fluid-structure interaction simulation approach are shown. Predictor and convergence acceleration schemes to improve the solution process are discussed and results for flexible ship propellers are presented.