Recently, the increase of noise pollution in the oceans due to human-related activities has attracted a lot of attention from corresponding authorities. Unfortunately, ships and their activities are among the main causes of noise generation in the oceans. It has been claimed that this industry alone has caused at least 20 dB increase in the ambient noise of the oceans. Consequently, specific regulations concerning the noise emission of commercial ships are to be expected in the next couple of years. For instance, one can point out the recent deliberations of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) with regard to marine noise pollution or those by the Bureau Veritas (BV), which recently introduced the optional class notation "NR 614" to address concerns related to underwater radiated noise generated by ships. These deliberations are also highlighted by findings of the European Commission regarding the preservation of the marine water environmental status. It is therefore expected that, in the near future, one of the major concerns of the marine industry will be to evaluate ship-induced far-field noise at the design stage. Nevertheless, the associated field of computational methodology is still relatively undeveloped, mainly due to the lack of binding legislative regulations in the past, the challenging nature of the problem-related physics, as well as the corresponding numerical challenges.

The aim of the project is to develop and implement design-stage appropriate methods to evaluate the acoustic signature of ship-propeller configurations with and without cavitation under consideration of fluid-structure-interaction. To this end, the boundary-element method panMARE is coupled to the structural solver AdhoC by means of the coupling software comana. An acoustic evaluation is performed by means of the Ffowcs-Williams Hawkings Equation. All involved software is developed at the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Ship Theory (FDS) and the Institute for Ship Structural Design and Analysis at the TUHH.