Design Method Application for a Propeller in Composite Materials

Abstract

Composite materials offer lot of advantages in marine and offshore domain, however all benefits are not yet fully harness by industrials by lack of knowledge and design assessment procedure for the certification. The research project FabHeli, partly funded by the French department of Defense (DGA), aims to design, manufacture and test in real conditions a propeller in composite materials. The paper will detail the design steps leading to the demonstrator, from the hydrodynamic computations to the structural assessment as well as full scale sea trials.