Finite element calculation of vibration modes of clamped propeller blades

The study presents results of numerical FE- calculations for modern skew propeller blades and their experimental validation. It is restricted to single clamped blades, an assumption easy to implement in the theoretical calculation but difficult to achieve in an experiment. Assumptions for the FE- calculations and the incomplete rigid clamped boundary condition in the experiment yield differences between experiment and theory, mainly in the eigenfrequencies. The fluid coupling to the structure is limited to the inviscid, incompressible case or k 1 << 1. In the limits of these assumptions the results of both, theory and experiments agree fairly.