Design and Performance Analysis of Ducted Propeller for 10kW-class Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

This study presents the design and performance analysis of a 10kW-class ducted propeller for an unmanned underwater vehicle(UUV). The initial design was based on the Ka-series propellers, determining the optimal blade number, propeller diameter, and mean pitch ratio. During the detailed design phase, considerations included the minimum expanded area ratio and hub ratio based on the underwater vehicle's geometry. Key design variables such as radial distributions of pitch and chord length were optimized to ensure manufacturability and high propeller open-water(POW) performance. For the POW performance analysis of the designed ducted propeller, a commercial computational fluid dynamics(CFD) software, STAR-CCM+ was utilized. The detailed design achieved a 1.6 % improvement in propulsion efficiency compared to the initial design at an advance ratio of 0.7.