Pleuger rudder
Encyclopedia
The Pleuger rudder is a power assisted ship's rudder
Rudder
A rudder is a device used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft or other conveyance that moves through a medium . On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to counter adverse yaw and p-factor and is not the primary control used to turn the airplane...

. It creates a flow of water in the direction the rudder points powered by an auxiliary electric motor. This aids maneuverability at low speeds greatly, since it operates on a similar principle to a thruster
Azimuth thruster
An azimuth thruster is a configuration of ship propellers placed in pods that can be rotated in any horizontal direction, making a rudder unnecessary...

.

A ducted propeller
Ducted propeller
A ducted propeller is a propeller fitted with a non-rotating nozzle. It is used to improve the efficiency of the propeller and are especially used on heavily loaded propellers or propellers with limited diameter. It was developed by Luigi Stipa and Ludwig Kort .Advantages are increased efficiency,...

 is mounted as an integral part of the rudder and is fixed to it. The duct is a Kort nozzle
Kort nozzle
The Kort nozzle is a shrouded, ducted propeller assembly for marine propulsion. The hydrodynamic design of the shroud, which is shaped like a foil, offers advantages for certain conditions over bare propellers....

and enables the propeller to develop more thrust than an unducted propeller.

The Pleuger rudder is necessarily mounted in the flow from the main engine's propeller in a ship with an odd number of propellers. If the Pleuger and the main engine are run at the same time, the Pleuger can often be torn away. The thrust produced by the Pleuger rudder is sufficient to power the ship in slow speed maneuvers when the force required to move the vessel is relatively small.
The pleuger rudder is meant to be assisting in the fast maneuverability of ships, in tight harbor operations. Thus, it is only an improvement of rudder by controlling the water flow pattern passing a rudder and thus giving it an artificial flow and thus an extra power to steer even in slow engine r.p.m.  It is absolutely not a substitute of propeller, without which, the mammoth energy required to make a ship move over water  is hard to generate.

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