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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2020, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (2): 123216-123216.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2019.23216

• Fluid Mechanics and Flight Mechanics • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A quick design method of propeller coupled with CFD correction

GUO Jiahao, ZHOU Zhou, FAN Zhongyun   

  1. School of Aeronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China
  • Received:2019-06-12 Revised:2019-09-08 Online:2020-02-15 Published:2019-10-24
  • Supported by:
    Equipment Pre-research Program (41411020401); Key R&D Project of Shaanxi Province (2018ZDCXL-GY-03-04); Civil Aircraft Project (MJ-2015-F-009); Taicang Innovation Leading Institute Project (TC2018DYDS24)

Abstract: The propeller design method based on the blade element momentum theory and the vortex theory has the problem of thrust deviation and cannot guarantee high efficiency due to the difference of the aerodynamic force of blade element between the design and the real situations. In order to solve this problem, the design is corrected by the numerical simulation of the propeller. Assuming that aerodynamic force of blade element along the radial direction is constant, the aerodynamic force can be inversely solved by numerical simulation results. Then the propeller is redesigned by the obtained aerodynamic force to establish a quick design method of propeller. The results show that the proposed design method can satisfy the design thrust in the small propeller design for solar energy UAV, and improve propeller efficiency by 2.75% compared with the traditional design method. And the efficiency of the propeller is further improved by 3.95% compared with the traditional design method after optimizing the airfoil of the propeller. Moreover, this method only needs to perform a small amount of CFD calculation, and the design cycle is shorter than directly using the numerical simulation to optimize the chord length and the twist angle distribution of the propeller.

Key words: solar energy UAV, propeller, blade element momentum theory, multiple reference frames, surrogate model, optimization design, high efficiency

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