Abstract: Tip vortex cavitation is one of the earliest cavitation types on marine propellers and once it occurs, it will significantly enhance the underwater noise level of ships. Therefore, with the increasing requirements of modern ships for speed and acoustic stealth performance, the demand for accurate prediction of propeller tip vortex cavitation inception, which is closely related to the critical speed of ships, has become increasingly urgent. However, the commonly used single-phase minimum pressure coefficient method and two-phase cavitation model method at this stage not only cannot fully consider the nuclei effect in the water, but also have obvious mesh dependence, which makes it difficult to accurately predict the tip vortex cavitation inception number of the propeller. So as to make up for the shortcomings of the existing prediction methods, a prediction method for the propeller tip vortex cavitation inception number based on the trend mutation test is established on the basis of the flow field simulation method considering the nuclei effect. Firstly, the elliptical wing simplified from the propeller blade is used as the research object to conduct sensitivity analysis on two subjective factors, namely, the judgement criteria of cavitation bubbles and the number of initial nuclei, to systematically verify the excellent robustness of this prediction method. Based on this, the influence of incoming flow velocity on the ability of tip vortex to capture nuclei is preliminarily explored. Research indicates that under cavitation inception conditions, a higher incoming flow velocity makes it more difficult for the nuclei to be captured by the tip vortex and grow into a cavitation bubble. Finally, the method is further applied to the prediction study of propeller tip vortex cavitation inception，and the results show that the accuracy of this method can be improved by more than 80% compared with the traditional minimum pressure coefficient method, which has obvious advantages.