Propeller Blade Design inside Boundary Layer
Inverse Design of Boundary-Layer-Ingesting Propulsors
A. Acharya (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
G. Eitelberg – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
A. Heidebrecht – Mentor (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
T. Sinnige – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
R. Merino Martinez – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
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Abstract
A coupled aerodynamic framework is developed that combines an axisymmetric potential-flow solver around a body of revolution with an integral boundary-layer model and an actuator-disk representation of the propulsor. The actuator disk is prescribed through a radial pressure jump, and a slipstream correction model is used to obtain a consistent combined velocity field inside and outside the wake. Loss-related behaviour is quantified using power-flux measures evaluated at freestream, upstream, and downstream stations, together with wake non-uniformity indicators and mixing-loss metrics based on radial shear in the developed slipstream.
Three families of radial loading are studied at equal thrust: a uniform pressure-jump baseline, a stepwise (multi-disk) redistribution, and an approximately elliptical. Results show that redistributing loading toward the ingested boundary-layer region can reduce downstream power-flux deficits and weaken radial velocity gradients, indicating reduced mixing losses compared with the uniform baseline. The analysis highlights a trade-off between concentrating thrust in low-momentum inflow and maintaining a smooth slipstream profile to minimise shear-driven dissipation.
Finally, an inverse blade-design procedure is presented to convert the prescribed actuator-disk loading into chord and twist distributions using a drag-aware blade-element–momentum formulation with airfoil polar data. The resulting geometries provide blade-level interpretations of the disk-level loading strategies and demonstrate how BLI-driven loading redistributions lead to propeller designs that differ substantially from conventional uniform-inflow propellers.