Design Aspects and Two-Dimensional CFD Simulation of a Marine Propulsor Based on a Biologically-Inspired Undulating Movement

Abstract

Nowadays, it is well known that aquatic animals have higher locomotion performance than man-made marine vehicles. There are a lot of researchers who have built different kinds of machines replicating the movement of animals. The principal problem is that it is very important to fully understand the hydrodynamics of biological swimming to design an optimal mechanism. For this reason, the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) has become a very powerful technique because it solves the governing equations of conservation of mass and momentum so as to obtain the fluid flow characteristics.
This paper presents the development of a marine propulsor based on an undulating fin which emulates fish movement. Furthermore, an extensively CFD investigation of the fluid flow around the propulsor is presented. As experimental tests were performed on a scaled model rather on a real ship, a non dimensional analysis was done. Particularly, the non-dimensional governing groups analyzed were the Reynolds, Froude and Strouhal numbers. The CFD results compared reasonably well with the experimental ones obtained on the lab prototype.