Prediction of Unsteady Effective Wake by a Euler Solver/Vortex-Lattice Coupled Method

Abstract

A fully three-dimensional Euler solver, based on a finite volume approach, is developed and applied to the prediction of the unsteady effective wake for propellers subject to non-axisymmetric inflows. The Euler solver is coupled with an existing lifting-surface vortex-lattice method for the computation of unsteady propeller flows. The coupled method is validated against the uniform inflow case, in which ideally the uniform flow should be recovered as the effective wake. The predicted total velocity field correlates very well with that measured in the water tunnel experiment. Lastly, the unsteady effective wake predicted by the present method is compared with the steady effective wake predicted by the authors' previous steady method.