Underwater acoustic field and pressure fluctuation on ship hull due to unsteady propeller sheet cavitation

The main objective of this paper is to develop an efficient numerical method which can predict the underwater acoustic field and pressure fluctuation on a ship hull due to unsteady propeller sheet cavitation by linear acoustic theory. In addition, the noise scattered from the ship hull and reflected from the free surface are included. Concerning the computation of the acoustic field induced by unsteady sheet cavitation and forces of a marine propeller, a method is derived without making any approximation about the distance function between the noise source and field point. Thus, this method can be used to predict acoustic pressure at both far and near fields, and this is very important for the scattering problem because the ship hull is located very close to the propeller. For the computation of the scattering problem, a more efficient and robust method is derived in time domain, which can treat multi-frequency waves scattered from underwater obstacles. The acoustic fields of a container ship radiated by the propeller and scattered from the ship hull with free surface is investigated in this paper. The pressure fluctuations of low blade rate on the ship hull induced by the propeller are also computed by the present method and are found to be similar to the results obtained by a panel method satisfying the Laplace equation for the points near the propeller due to the small retarding time. However, for the points on the ship hull away from the propeller, the differences of the results between two methods will increase.