Parametric design of a marine propulsion system for simulator application

Ships are not only floating dynamic systems on water free surface, but also are including very kind of operational process. Especially, staff which is working in main engine room, must be educated well. Teoratical education systems and labrotaries are not sufficient for these university students which will be a member of main engine room staff when they graduate from the university. Therefore, main engine room simulators can be useful for the candidates before attending real ship operations. These reasons demonstrates that main engine room simulators are truely important for the ship staff education. Marine engineers' education should be decreased the time to orient the operation of engine room systems and machines. Maritime Education and Training (MET) of marine engineering candidates contain the different type of operational and management training levels. Traditional education methods are not adequate for creating specific scenarios in real conditions. These methods includes using lab and classroom teachings as well as using a commercial ship. In a simulator environment, the training can be focused directly in different scenerios and real situations. Because of the reasons, the usage of an engine room simulator in MET is becoming popular in education. The usage of some simulator system like this, can prevent the maritime accidents due to human errors and lack of konowledge. Because of the maritime accidents, the use of simulators would add a high value to the education and training of maritime staff therefore to the worldwide maritime safety. This study is a part of a project which is funded Turkish Ministry of Science and Technology, is the development of neither the Marine Engine Room Simulator (ERS). The development of the Marine Engine Room Simulator (ERS) does not exist in Turkey yet for use in marine engineering education. Simulators which is using for MET in, is developed by manufacturers from different countries; Japan, Norway, Poland, USA, UK, and Russia. As there are about 15 university level maritime schools in Turkey (exluding naval academies), development of both ship handling and engine room simulators by the development of main engine simulator, which can be considered as the first step of ERS, in Turkey would be beneficial for both economy and to be able to update the software code for modern requirements for the continuous use of the simulators in use. In this Project, main engine room simulation software will be developed for MET of students. Addition to this, because of that the modular software development approach will provide current bachelor and postgraduate students with the infrastructure to implement their related design projects and thesis. Furthermore, this simulator system will offer a flexible infrastructure that aims to have continuous development architecture for applying different engine types, ships and parameters while it is providing a flexible use. In this study which is a part of the Project, propulsion system design, parametric propeller design and modelling, determining hydrodynamic performance of the propulsion system are aimed for the development of Marine Engine Room Simulator. Within the scope of this study, some information which is necessary for development a propulsion system, were investigated with using experimental test results. Then properties of propulsion system, target ship and design parameters were determined. A wide range of literature review was realized for main engine room simulators. During the literature review, a study which was not found in the previous studies, was realized with using computational fluid dynamics methods (CFD) for evaluation of propeller's performance. In this thesis, the most important feature and attribute of this study will be separate from other studies in the literature. After the determining of target ship, Maxsurf HullSpeed was used to calculate the total resistance of ship. The most important thing is to determine the total resistance of ship for propulsion system in propeller desing process to define target thrust value. Addition to Maxsurf resistance calculation module, a code which is on attachment 1 at the end of this doucment, was developed for the calculation on Matlab. This Matlab code will help to someone for using different type and dimensions of ships to update simulation system according to new conditions. The calculation of total ship resistance was carried out and then main engine was selected according to the value. Propeller desing methods and approaches was investigated before design process. The best option for propeller design was determined as special propeller design for the ship geometry. The aim of this study is to design optimum propeller for ship efficiency, fuel consumption and international rules such as IMO. A traditional method for designing a propeller for a target ship is following a selection process from previously established database of propellers called propeller series. Propeller series propeller design method which is a selection from propellers series, provides a fast and cheap method of solution. Design from propeller series includes calculation of the performance characteristics which are obtained from towing tank test of various ship models, were demonstrated with some graphs. The propeller who is selected from the propeller series, have a special geometry with its parameters like blade number, pitch ratio and expanded area ratio etc. And this geometry cannot be changed by the designer. On the other hand, recent focuses for energy efficiency due to both cost and environmental concerns, made the design and development of maritime propellers customized for the ships that they will be used. The focus of this study is this second method of custom and special propeller design and development. In this custom design, propeller is analysed with the iterative approach with using CFD methods, and the propeller is designed specially, must be produced expected thrust force which was calculated from ship total resistance. Design of the propeller can be realized with the analysis. In this process, analysis methods such as lifting line method, lifting surface method, finite element (FEA) methods and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods are used by designers for designing of custom propellers. Within the scope of this master thesis, a propulsion system with an optimum propeller was designed for a target ship and hydrodynamic performance calculations were realised with using CFD methods. First of all hydrodynamics calculations, validation studies for standard propellers were performed with Ansys software to identify error margin for analysis metodology. DTMB 4119 and VP 1304 standard test propellers was used this validation studies. The details of the analysis and results are on this documents. The methodology and error margin was used for the new design propeller of target ship. Experimental results that were obtained before curising data, were used for hydrodynamic analysis for propeller performance calculations. According to the different position of governor control, analysis were realized with using different revolution and advance speed of ship. Using these values, analysis were repeated every condition and torque and thrust values were calculated with CFD method. Torque and thrust coefficients were calculated using thrust and torque values that were taken from the analysis results to evaluate hydrodynamic performance of designed propeller. At the end of this analysis process, it can be seen that new propeller geometry which was designed for this project, is suitable for target ship and have high effciency. After all design and analysis process, new design propeller's hydrodynamic performances and current propeller's experimental test results were compared. The comparing shows that the new design propeller produces higher thrust and needs less torque from the main engine. So, the propeller has more efficiency value than the current propeller. Thus, less engine power will be needed with the new designed propeller. These studies demostrates that, the new designed propeller is designed to work efficiently than existing vessels in the forward direction.