*3.3. 3D Printed Propeller Model*

Hamill et al. [8] studied the characteristics of the propeller wash of a manoeuvring ship and the resulting bed scour based on two propellers, propeller-76 and propeller-131. The propeller characteristics used in experiments are shown in Table 2. The current propeller model used is being termed as propeller-A and propeller-B.


For the current experiments, the solid propeller geometry was created by using the Solidworks and printed on the 3D printer made by JG Aurora in China using biodegradable polylactic acid filament (PLA) material. The actual propeller model was created through the additive process by printing the propeller layer by layer up to 0.1 mm. Two hours were taken to complete the entire printing process. Figure 4a shown the propeller printed in progress and Figure 4b shows the completed propeller with the temporary supporting structure, which needs to be eliminated in the post-processing.
