Objectives The composite material has the advantages of light weight, corrosion resistance and high damping ratio. In order to improve the comprehensive performance of underwater vehicles, the characteristics research of composite material rotor pump-jet propulsor is carried out.

Methods Firstly, by combining Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and the Finite Element method (FEM), a two-way fluid-structure coupling method and a flow noise prediction method based on FW-H equation are established for the composite rotor pump-jet propulsor. Then, investigated the open water performance, structural response characteristics and flow noise characteristics of the composite rotor pump-jet propulsor under different working conditions.

Results Results show that with increase of advance speed coefficient, the structural deformation and stress-strain values of composite pump-jet propulsor rotor decrease, while the overall sound pressure level of flow noise decreases first and then increases, the lowest is 87.60 dB when J=0.8. Compared with the traditional aluminum alloy pump-jet propulsor, the rotor structure deformation of model scale composite pump-jet propulsor is little, which has no effect on its hydrodynamic shape and does not cause obvious change its hydrodynamic performance; the flow noise of composite pump-jet propulsor is reduced slightly at specific frequency, and overall sound pressure level reduction is also relatively small.

Conclusion  The research findings can provide theoretical foundations for the comprehensive performance optimization such as weight reduction and noise reduction design of pump-jet propulsor.