Investigation on effects of airfoil variation in a slotted propeller
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Date
2019-06
Authors
Nirresh Prabu A/L Ravindran
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Abstract
The usage of slots has gained renewed interest in aerospace particularly
on propeller design. Most of the works have focused on improving the
aerodynamic performance and efficiency. Modern research on propeller design
aims to design propellers with high thrust performance under low torque
conditions without any weight penalty. This paper discussed computational fluid
dynamics method to predict propeller performance for a small scale propeller. In
addition, the performance of the slotted blade designs is presented, in terms of
thrust coefficient, power coefficient and efficiency. The performance of slotted
propeller blade is influence by the different types of airfoils being used on the
blade. Thus, the shape of the slot is fixed which is a square shaped slot and the
position of the slot is also fixed at 62.5% of the Chord length. Although research
on slotted design has been done before, none has been done for different Airfoils
on the propeller blade. Thus, this study aims to provide an extensive research on
slotted propeller design with different Airfoils of different properties such as high
Reynolds number, low Reynolds number, symmetrical, asymmetrical high lift
and low drag. The basis for the propeller will be the APC Slow Flyer. The flow
simulations are performed through three-dimensional computational fluid
dynamic software (ANSYS Fluent) to determine the thrust coefficient, power
coefficient and overall efficiency measured in advancing flow conditions.