Exhaustive Analysis on Aircraft Propeller Performance through a BEMT Tool

When aircraft propellers are to be either selected or designed, it is useful to consider how performance changes for different operational conditions and how it is affected by geometrical parameters. This allows a better understanding of the propeller operation, being a crucial issue since propeller performance plays an important role in the overall aircraft performance and energy consumption. A reliable validated computational tool for performance prediction on fixed-wing aircraft propellers is presented along with some corrections applied to the method to account for complex phenomena present in the propeller operation, to improve its reliability. An extensive set of simulations is carried out to analyze how different performance parameters change at various operational conditions (such as flight speed and height) and how it is affected by the most important geometrical parameters. The most relevant considerations about propeller operation are identified and compared, highlighting which ones have the most significant impact on performance; finally providing an idea about the most suitable combination of general geometrical parameters for different mission profiles.