A Comparative Study of Conventional and Tip-Fin Propeller Performance

During more than a decade several attempts have been made to obtain higher propeller efficiencies by radically modifying the geometry in the tip region of the blade. In the tip-fin propeller a tip fin or winglet is attached to the blade tip and integrated into the blade in such a way that the blade tip is softly curved towards the suction side.Whereas the developments previously have been concentrated mainly on increasing the efficiency of the propeller, the emphasis of current efforts has been on both high efficiency as well as good cavitation properties. This has resulted in a design with a combination of skew and tip fin. To evaluate the design, open-water, self-propulsion and cavitation model tests have been carried out. The tests are done for the conventional propeller originally designed for the ship and for a tip-fin propeller designed for the same ship under the same operation conditions.The results of the model tests show higher open-water efficiency of the tip-fin propeller as well as higher over-all propulsive efficency. Depending on the method used in the full-scale extrapolation this corresponds to reduction in propulsive power of 3.7 to 4.7 per cent. Both propellers suffer from slight wake field behind the ship. The tip-fin propeller suffered a little more from cavitation than the conventional propeller which gave rise to maximum, measured, first-order pressure pulses of 1.3 to 1.4 times those of the conventional propeller.