The Improvement of the Powering Performance on the Japan Bulk Carrier (JBC) using Rudder Thrust Fin as a Post-Swirl Stator

Post Swirl Stator (PSS), also known as the 'Energy Saving Device (ESD) Behind the Propeller' operates within the slip stream of the propeller. The aim of this project is to investigate the powering performance of a JAPAN Bulk Carrier (JBC) upon the installation of PSS. The prediction of resistance and propulsive factors were conducted using CFD simulation using SHIPFLOW CFD code. In order to find the optimised design of the ESD, three parameters were laid out and studied. The parameters are the left side fin length, right side fin length and the orientation of the fins.The aim of this study are to improvise the thrust fin design by changing the parameters to get the optimum powering performance result, and to quantify the powering performance of the JBC upon the installation of PSS in model and full scale. There were 27 different post-swirl stator configurations. All the 27 different configurations were compared in terms of its performance in model and full scale. All the 27 different configurations were simulated using full RANSE. The free surface of the water were modelled using panel method. A grid dependence study was conducted to determine the best grid cell resolution and it was chosen at a total of 7 millions cells. The bare hull resistance of the JBC were validated with available published experiment results. All the thrust fins were modelled using appendage setting in SHIPFLOW. The best thrust fins design were selected in judging its minimum drag, minimum thrust deduction fraction, minimum wake fraction, and the delivered power. It was found that he thrust fins design for case study #20 by CFD is the most optimised configuration in terms of its performance criteria as mentioned earlier. The thrust fins design was able to reduce delivered power to 6.012%. Thrust deduction was also reduced to 2.927%. Total efficiency was increased to 6.709%