Thrust by a ship propulsion device acting on the water (or on the air) is produced by imparting sternward acceleration to a mass of that water or air. The forward thrust is proportional to the product of the mass of fluid acted upon and the accelerating rate. For the most efficient propulsion, the mass should be large and the acceleration small. In a screw propeller, this calls for a large diameter and a small increase in relative backward velocity when water is passing through the propeller.

The thrust per blade of a propulsion device is measured by the reduction in pressure on the back or advancing side of the blade and the increase in pressure on the face or after side. As a rule, the former is much larger than the latter so that the blade draws or pulls rather than pushes itself through the fluid in which it works.

Modern propulsion methods for boats and ships include oars, sails, paddle tracks, paddle wheels, hydraulic and pump jets, airscrews, rotating-blade propellers, and screw propellers. Screws are usually run in the open, but for producing high thrusts at low ship speeds, as when towing, they may be surrounded by a fixed shrouding such as the Kort nozzle. Vertical axis propellers with adjustable blades offer the great advantage that the magnitude and direction of thrust can be varied at will, making them vastly more versatile than any known combination of screw propeller and rudder, and giving the craft exceptional maneuverability. A tug fitted with one or more such propellers can exert a pull equally well in any direction. The number of propulsion devices depends upon the available power in each engine, the need for reliability or maneuverability, the limiting draft and many other factors.

Interactions between propeller and ship

The operation of a screw propeller involves a number of interactions that are by no means fully understood. Part of the water through which the propeller moves is the boundary layer moving aft past the hull, with a relative velocity less than the ship velocity. Another part of it lies within the wave crest (or trough) that runs along above the propeller. Because of these and other effects, the water moves at different velocities and in different directions in different parts of the propeller disk. In general, the ship drags the water along with it to a certain extent, so that its average speed V_a past the propeller is less than the ship speed V. The difference V−V_a is the wake velocity, and the ratio of this velocity to the ship speed is the wake fraction w = V−V_a/V.

There are reduced pressures in the region forward of the propeller, resulting from corresponding pressures on the forward sides of the blades. These act to increase the hull resistance R and require a greater thrust T to overcome it. This resistance augment or loss of thrust is T−R and the thrust deduction fraction t = T−R/T.

Efficiency of propulsion

The efficiency with which any mechanical propulsion device drives a ship is a product of three separate ratios. The first is propeller efficiency, the ratio of input to output when the device is running in open water by itself, as when a model is tested in a model basin. The second, known as the hull efficiency, is the ratio 1−t/1−w, indicating the average effect of hull-propeller interaction. The third, known as the relative rotative efficiency, is the ratio of the propeller efficiency when the device is running in open water to the propeller efficiency operating in the irregular ship’s wake.

For ships having screw propellers, the efficiency of propulsion decreases as more propellers are added. It varies from 0.76 to 0.80 or more for a well-placed and well-designed single screw, from 0.65 to 0.72 for twin screws, and from 0.60 to 0.64 for quadruple screws such as are carried by large liners and warships.

In practice, the open-water efficiency for a given size of propulsion device is found to vary in almost predictable fashion with the thrust loading coefficient, T/V_a². Starting with this factor, it is possible to estimate the shaft power required to drive a ship having a known resistance at any given speed.