Comparative Analysis of Conventional and Toroidal Propeller through CFD Methods

Toroidal propeller comprising circular blades is gaining significant attention due to higher efficiency; lower noise levels and other advantages compared to the current propeller models. However, scientific publications on toroidal propeller is still limited, as the majority rely only on field experiments. Therefore, this study aimed to compare the performance of toroidal and conventional propeller to determine the improvement produced by toroidal propeller. The geometric parameters used to model the conventional propeller to resemble the toroidal included propeller diameter, number of leaves, hub diameter and blade front view. The pitch geometric parameter on the conventional propeller was varied to determine whether its efficiency would be similar to the toroidal propeller. In this study, each propeller model was simulated at 1000 - 6000 RPM using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation with Simscale software. This CFD simulation produced thrust and torque values which were calculated to obtain efficiency values. The results showed that thrust and torque values on the propeller increased along with high pitch and RPM. In terms of efficiency, a variation of the conventional propeller with a pitch of 171.45 mm produced higher efficiency values compared to the toroidal propeller, but had low thrust. Furthermore, visualization of fluid flow on each model showed that the best flow was shown by toroidal propeller without vorticity. These results provided valuable information on toroidal propeller and contributed to the further development of the technology design.