Comprehensive Propulsion Systems
Michigan Wheel has had great success designing and manufacturing wake-adapted propellers for pleasure craft, work boats, and patrol boats. Benefits compared to off the shelf propellers include reduced fuel costs, higher top speed, and greatly reduced vibrations.
While our CX and Marlin propellers are custom designed for a boat’s specific engine power, shaft RPM, and top speed, Michigan Wheel has the capability to go one step further. Through advanced computer modeling and simulation, our engineering team can examine a boat’s wake and design a propeller specifically for that wake. Due to different hull shapes, shaft and strut configurations, and other differences, each boat design has its own wake characteristics. Wakes also change with speed as well as load and trim conditions.
Propellers operate in this region of disturbed water called the wake, and the conditions have a large effect on propeller efficiency and vibration characteristics. A propeller that is designed to take into account these conditions is called a wake-adapted propeller. Wake-adapted propellers offer significant efficiency gains, speed gains, and reductions in vibration.
For a long time, wake-adapted technology was only available through expensive model testing. The advent of high performance computers has allowed highly educated engineers to model the entire boat and appendages and run simulations to analyze the wake and its effect on propellers. Not only is it significantly less costly and less time consuming compared to model testing, but it also allows the propeller designer to study propeller and flow characteristics that would be impossible to measure with model testing.
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