Fatigue strength assessment of propellers by means of weakly coupled CFD and FEM analyses

Propeller design considerably evolved during years, continuously imposing new challenges to the designer, from usual high efficiency and avoidance of erosive cavitation up to reduction of radiated noise and pressure pulses for "high added value" ships. New more stringent limits, together with a general requirement for performances optimization, leads to the need of a continuous review of design procedures which, in some cases, still rely on rather "old-fashioned" approaches. The aim of this paper is to analyse in detail the importance of considering fatigue phenomena in the propeller design, proposing a procedure for the evaluation in time of the stress field acting on a blade during one revolution, which is then considered for fatigue assessment.