Design of Ducted Propulsors for Towing Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

We describe the numerical simulation based design method for marine propulsor which can be used for towing Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). The thrust loading coefficient of the propulsor is very high due to the drag of the payload. The base geometry of the propeller used in this study is Ka-4-70 propeller with nozzle no. 22. The CFD model is validated using the experimental results for the open-water performance tests. The stator of the propulsor is designed using basic principles of axial compressor design technique. The effect of stator's thickness is calculated on propulsor's performance. The geometry of the propulsor is parametrized in CAESES. The performance of the propulsor is calculated using high-fidelity CFD RANSE solver in StarCCM+.