A critical review of different works on marine propellers over the last three decades

Propeller is the main energy-producing device for any marine vehicle. To make waterway communication economical, efficient and environment friendly, improvement of ship propulsion system is achieving great interest nowadays. This paper aims to perform a brief review of the mechanism and various phenomena that play a crucial role in the performance of marine propeller from a different aspect. Here different structural analyses, suitable material selection, various propulsive methods, acoustic and vibration analysis are discussed in detail. Alongside, various energy-saving devices (ESDs) are presented in brief to understand the recovery of energy losses due to cavitation and other associated factors. Various optimization techniques and control mechanism are also highlighted here in brief. The main objective of the paper is to present the current research scenarios in the field of marine propeller and identify future research scope in the respective field.