Research into propellers has been rejuvenated recently, as the efficiency of propulsive systems becomes increasingly important. A drawback of propellers is their aeroacoustic noise, which can be reduced by adding blade sweep. This thesis investigates the effect of sweep on the aerodynamic performance of propellers by comparing a swept and a new, unswept propeller utilising a wind tunnel experiment and lifting-line methods.
The wind tunnel results show no significant differences in the integrated performance between the two propellers, although the slipstreams are different. It was found that the swept propeller has an outboard shift in the blade loading from flowfield measurements. The lifting-line results indicate a greater effect of sweep on performance than the experimental results. These differences can primarily be attributed to the 2D airfoil polar data used in the lifting-line simulations. The shift in outboard loading due to the sweep distribution is present in the computational results.
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