Numerical Study on Cavitation Characteristics of Propeller Under Oblique Flow Conditions

To study the cavitation characteristics of propellers under oblique flow conditions and quantitatively analyze the blade cavitation area, this paper takes the PC456 propeller model as the research object. Based on the OpenFOAM platform, the cavitation performance of the PC456 propellers under oblique flow is numerically calculated using the SST k-ω turbulence model and Schnerr-Sauer cavitation model. The results show that the influence of oblique flow on the hydrodynamic performance of the propeller cavitation increases with the increase of the oblique flow angle. Within the phase range of [-90°, 40° ], the cavitation area of the blade reaches its maximum at the -20° phase, and as the oblique angle increases, the amplitude of the change in bubble area also increases. In addition, the numerically predicted cavitation areas are in good agreement with the experimental results, especially under conditions of low cavitation numbers, which validates the effectiveness of the numerical method used in this study.