An investigation on the effect of the wall treatments in RANS simulations of model and full-scale marine propeller flows

A numerical analysis is carried out for the marine propellers in open water conditions to investigate the effect of the wall treatments in model and full scale. The standard wall function to apply the low of the wall and the two layer zonal model to calculate the whole boundary layer for a transition phenomenon are used with one turbulence model. To determine an appropriate distance of the first grid point from the wall when using the wall function, a formula based on Reynolds number is suggested, which can estimate the maximum y+ satisfying the logarithmic law. In the model scale, it is confirmed that a transition calculation is required for a model scale propeller with low Reynolds number that the transient region appears widely. While in the full scale, the wall function calculation is recommended for efficient calculations due to the turbulence dominant flow for large Reynolds number.