Abstract
A two-stroke diesel engine and a propeller normally adopted in large merchant ships are regarded as major ship vibration sources. They are directly connected and generate various excitation components proportional to the rotating speed of diesel engine. Among the components, the magnitude of two excitation components with the same frequency generated by both engine and propeller can be compensated by the adjustment of their phase difference. It can be done by the optimization of propeller assembly angle but requires a number of burdensome trials to find the optimal angle. In this paper, the efficient estimation method to determine optimal propeller assembly angle is proposed. Its application requires the axial vibration measurement in sea trial and the numerical vibration analysis for propulsion shafting which can be substituted by additional vibration measurement after one-trial modification of propeller assembly angle. In order to verify the validity of the proposed method, the phase difference between two fifth order excitation components generated by both diesel engine and propeller of a real ship is calculated by the finite element analysis and its result is indirectly validated by the comparison of axial vibration responses at intermediate shaft obtained by the numerical analysis and the measurement in sea trial. Finally, it is numerically confirmed that axial vibration response at intermediate shaft at a resonant speed can be decreased more than 87 % if the optimal propeller assembly angle determined by the proposed method is applied.