Abstract
Propellers operating in a given nonuniform ship wake generate unsteady loads leading to undesirable stern vibration problems. The skew is known to be the most proper and effective geometric parameter to control or reduce the fluctuating forces on the shaft. This paper assumes the skew profile as either a quadratic or a cubic function of the radius and determines the coefficients of the polynomial function by applying the simplex method. The method uses the converted unconstrained algorithm to solve the constrained minimization problem of 6-component shaft excitation forces. The propeller excitation was computed either by applying the two-dimensional gust theory for quick estimation or by the fully three-dimensional unsteady lifting surface theory in time domain for an accurate solution. A sample result demonstrates that the shaft forces can be further reduced through optimization from the original design.
