Performance-based design and analysis of flexible composite propulsors

Advanced composite propellers, turbines, and jet engines have become increasingly popular in part because of their ability to provide improved performance over traditional metallic rotors through exploitation of the intrinsic bend–twist coupling characteristics of anisotropic composite materials. While these performance improvements can be significant from a conceptual perspective, the load-dependent deformation responses of adaptive blades make the design of these structures highly non-trivial. Hence, it is necessary to understand and predict the dependence of the deformations on the geometry, material constitution, and fluid–structure interaction responses across the entire range of expected loading conditions.The objective of this work is to develop a probabilistic performance-based design and analysis methodology for flexible composite propulsors. To demonstrate the method, it is applied for the design and analysis of two (rigid) metallic and (flexible) composite propellers for a twin-shafted naval combatant craft. The probabilistic operational space is developed by considering the variation of vessel thrust requirements as a function of the vessel speed and wave conditions along with the probabilistic speed profiles. The performance of the metallic and composite propellers are compared and discussed. The implications of load-dependent deformations of the flexible composite propeller on the operating conditions and the resulting performance with respect to propeller efficiency, power demand, and fluid cavitation are presented for both spatially uniform and varying flows. While the proposed framework is demonstrated for marine propellers, the methodology can be generally applied for any marine, aerospace, or wind energy structure that must operate in a wide range of loading conditions over its expected life.