Ship propellers have wide blades to distribute the loading over the blades. As we have seen previously this is necessary to reduce local negative pressures to avoid, as much as possible, the generation of cavitation. We can then think of the blades as low-aspect-ratio wings that rotate and translate through the water. To describe the flow we consider the propeller blades as lifting surfaces over which we distribute singularities to model the effects of blade loading and thickness. This was done in Chapter 14 for uniform inflows and in Chapter 15 for varying blade loadings in hull wakes. But in those chapters we only considered the pressure from assumed distributions of loading and thickness over the propeller blades. To be able to find these distributions we must establish a relation between the pressure and the velocity and fulfill the kinematic boundary condition on the blades. We anticipate that the operation of the blades in the spatially varying flow, generated by the hull, will give rise to forces which vary with blade position. Hence it is necessary to treat the blades as lifting surfaces with non-stationary pressure distributions.

In this chapter an overview of the extensive literature of the past three decades is followed by a detailed development of a linear theory which is sufficiently accurate for prediction of the unsteady forces arising from only the temporal-mean spatial variations of inflow.