Objectives  In order to develop a highly efficient method for propeller design optimization, the adjoint method is studied based on surface panel method.

  Methods  An adjoint equation is established under the conditions of zero normal velocity of blade and equal-pressure Kutta to obtain a formulae for solving sensitive derivative problem. A DTMB 4381 propeller is used as the research objective to calculate the sensitive derivatives of propeller performance to design parameters using the adjoint method and traditional method respectively for solving governing equation. Next, an analysis of senstive derivatives on a ship propeller design is carried out based on the adjoint method.The sensitive derivatives are then obtained and applied to optimize the geometric parameters of the propeller, achieving the optimal solutions which are compared with that by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm of ISIGHT.

  Results  The results indicate that the sensitive derivatives caluculated via the adjoint method are not only in good agreement with that by traditional method, but also offers much higher computation efficiency, generating optimal solutions of the propeller design superior to that by PSO algorithm with less time-consumption.

  Conclusions  The research shows that the computation efficiency of the adjoint method is superior to traditional intelligent algorithms in multi-parameters optimization design of ship propellers.