A Potential Panel Method for the Analysis of Propellers in Unsteady Flow

The unsteady flow around an open marine propeller subject to a spatially non-uniform inflow is analyzed by utilizing a time marching potential based panel method. An efficient algorithm is implemented in order to ensure an explicit Kutta condition at the blade trailing edge at each time step. Numerical results are shown to be convergent with respect to the size of the time step and the number of panels on the propeller and also to be consistent with existing analytic solutions and experimental data.