Numerical Investigation of the Wake of a Submarine Propeller by large-eddy simulation

Coherent structures play a dominant role in affecting the wake features of submarine propellers. Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) is especially well suited for investigating such influence, since the large energy-carrying structures of the flow are fully resolved with no turbulence modeling. However, detailed validations with experiments are rather limited in the literature, especially for the forward mode of operation, due to the challenges associated to both computations and experiments of this class of flows. Here the focus will be especially on the comparison of present LES computations of a notional seven-bladed propeller in open-water conditions with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) results, to assess carefully the capability of LES to capture the flow physics. A comparison across three values of advance coefficient will be also presented, based on the full three-dimensional fields from computations, in order to illuminate the influence of this parameter on flow features and wake coherence.