Principles of High-efficiency Electric Flight – Part 2: Propeller and Windprop Performance
The aerodynamics of the propeller are reviewed, and we describe a method to predict propeller performance by combining a lifting-line and wake numerical integration with Glauert’s classical “blade-element-method” induced-velocities. The method is validated with test data for a variety of propellers, including applications of sweep and cascade theory to accurately predict the blade loads of a propfan at flight speeds up to 0.8 Mach number. An EXCEL model, freely available at the author’s website, is briefly demonstrated and applied to define propeller geometry and compute performance with minimal setup and computation times.