A Review of Methods for Hydro-Acoustic Analysis of Non-Cavitating Marine Propellers

Underwater Radiated Noise (URN) emanating from surface and underwater marine platforms has become a significant concern for all the Nations in view of the global requirement to minimise the increasing adverse impact on marine mammals and fishes and maintain ecological balance in the ‘Silent’ ocean environment. Ambient noise level in the sea, in 10 to 300 Hz frequency band, has increased by 20 to 30 dB due to shipping (Wittekind, 2009). Marine propeller (in non-cavitating and cavitating regime) is a potential contributor to the ships noise and a lot of scientific research has been undertaken and considerable progress has been achieved in estimating the hydro-acoustic performance of marine propellers. In light of this, the scope of this paper is to review and critically examine the various methods used for estimating the hydro-acoustic performance of marine propellers, particularly in the non-cavitating regime, over the past many years. This review paper brings out the details, applicability, merits and demerits of various methods, extrapolation laws to obtain full scale results, scientific conclusion of all the know-how on this subject and the scope of further research as perceived by the authors. This paper also presents a numerical methodology to estimate the noise radiated by a DTMB 4119 model propeller in the non-cavitating regime in open water condition. The hydrodynamic analysis of the propeller was performed using commercial CFD software STARCCM+, closure was achieved using standard k-ε turbulence model and hydro-acoustic predictions have been performed using FWH acoustic analogy. The results compare very well with the published literature.