Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference
Shanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

Research on calculation and measurement of pin shaft force of steering and reversing gear of water-jet
propulsion
Cunyin Yu2, Jun Wang1,2*, Xueqin Liu1,2, Zhenghao Liu1,2,Kunyu Meng1,2,Zhihong Zhai1,2
1. Science and Technology of Water Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Shanghai, China
2. Marine Design &Research Institute of China, Shanghai, China*

Corresponding Author

reduce the maximum force on the pin shaft and make the force of pin
shaft well-distributed. Optimizing the design of the pin shaft is beneficial
to prolong the life of the sleeve, reduce the stress of the shaft hole andimprove the structural safety factor of the steering reversing mechanism.
In order to predict the stress of the pin shaft precisely and provide moreaccurate design input for the optimization of the inverted navigation
hydraulic system, experimental measurement and simplified model
calculation are mainly conducted to study it in the recent years, Chislett
et al. (1998) conducted a model experiment based on the steering
reversing mechanism model of a large water jet propulsion device. In thetest, the steering force and reversing force of the reversing mechanism
were obtained through six component measurement. Li et al. (2020)
investigated hydrodynamic of the KAMEWA steering reversing
mechanism model through both experiments and numerical simulations,and it was shown that the error between the calculated results and the test
results is less than 15％. With more and more focus on the structural
calculation of steering reversing mechanism, Liu (2012) took thecombined rudder as the research object, and applied both CFD method
and momentum theory method in the analysis of combined rudder, and it
is concluded that a set of reliable structural design method is establishedto optimize the combined rudder. However, the research on the steering
reversing mechanism is still limited to the calculation of the force
characteristics and hydrodynamic performance of the overall structure ofsteering reversing mechanism without focus on the force of thecomponents of the steering reversing mechanism (Zhai et al., 2018).
Meanwhile, the design input of hydraulic system is achieved by thesimplified model calculation method mainly depending on momentum
method and vector method, which can not provide accurate input for the
optimal design of steering reversing mechanism. At present, the fluid
structure coupling simulation method is widely applied to the research ofpropulsion performance (Zhu et al., 2009; Song et al., 2012; Zou et al.,2017), so the axial force of each pin shaft is obtained by means of
CFD+FEM while the force measurement experiment of the steering
reversing mechanism is carried out in the circulating water tank. Lastly,
the conclusions are made by both numerical simulation andexperimental results.
.

ABSTRACTThe steering and reversing gear is the main component of the water-jet
propulsion which can embody the superiority of the manipulation of thewater-jet propulsion ship. However, it is difficult to get an accurate input
for mechanism structure optimization and hydraulic system design
because the jet flow in steering and reversing unit is quite complex. In
this paper, a CFD+FEM fluid-structure coupling simulation method isestablished to calculate the pin force, and the results of modelexperiments and numerical simulation are compared. The results showthat the hydrodynamic load on the structure can be calculated accurately
by CFD, and the pin force measured is consistent with the predictedresults. The error between the numerical calculation and modelexperiments basically within the error range, which indicates that thefluid structure coupling numerical simulation method has excellent
accuracy of providing input for the optimal design of the steering andreversing unit.

KEY WORDS: water-jet propulsion; steering and reversing gear; pin
shaft force; fluid structure coupling simulation; model experiments.

INTRODUCTION
The water-jet propulsion is made up of three mechanical parts: steering
reversing mechanism, propulsion and inlet channel (Wang, 2009).
Steering reversing mechanism mainly includes rudder and reversing
bucket. Rudder deflection drives water flow deflection to bring about
ship steering, and reversing bucket drives water flow forward deflection
to realize ship reversing (Tian, 2012). It is important part of ship
operating system. The connecting rod mechanism is constructed between
the rudder and the reversing mechanism of the steering reversing
mechanism through the connection of the rotating pair, so that it canmove under the action of the hydraulic cylinder. Therefore, it is of greatsignificance for the water jet propulsion system to ensure the stable andefficient operation of the steering reversing mechanism. Moreover, thelayout of the actuator is a key link in the design of the steering reversing
mechanism. Especially, the position of the rotating auxiliary pin shaft of
the actuator will have a great effect on the motion relationship between
the connecting rods and the force characteristics of each fulcrum.
Therefore, one of the objectives of the optimization of the steering
reversing mechanism is to make the force on the mechanism reasonable:

NUMERICAL SIMULATIONIn this paper, the steering reversing mechanism of a water-jet propulsion
device is taken as the research object, which is designed based on theCSU 1150 from Marine Jet Power (2017). The calculation condition

3919