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Theoretical Max Propeller Efficiency
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Note: This essay is meant for people that already have a pretty firm
understanding of aeronautical engineering. I will not go into a lot of
detail explaining things that are generally known in the field.
I'm writing this essay, like I do a lot of my essays, because I couldn't
find this information on the net, so I had to develop it myself, and I
thought I'd make that available to everybody. By the end of this essay,
I will have developed a method to calculate the theoretical maximum
thrust that can be produced by a propeller for a given diameter and a
given power. Note that all equations use consistent units. You will
have to convert all nonconsistent units (ex: 1 HP = 550 ft-lb/s).
While working on a project designing a propeller at work, I wanted to
know just how good I was doing. Efficiency is one measure of how
well a propeller is performing, but it's not necessarily a good indication
of how well the design is performing up to its potential. In aviation,
propulsive efficiency is defined as:
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where is efficiency, T is Thrust, V is Velocity, and Pavail is Power
Available, or power going into the propeller. Basically, power out
divided by power in. This equation is very useful for many cases, but
you should see a problem in that as your velocity goes to zero, no
matter how much thrust you're producing, your efficiency goes to zero.
So how do you know how good your prop is doing at low speeds or
statically? Well, there's another term that can be used, Figure of Merit,
which is Induced Power divided by Power Available, or how much of
your power is going into accelerating the air. A Figure of Merit of 1 is
the best you're ever going to do. You can't accelerate the air any more
than that. So, Figure of Merit gives a pretty good indication of how well
the prop is doing at any airspeed. Figure of Merit is calculated as:
where F.O.M. is Figure of Merit, T is Thrust, VA is aircraft velocity, VI
is induced velocity at the propeller, and Pavail is Power Available.
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Now, we'd like to turn this equation around to solve for thrust for a
given Figure of Merit. The only problem is that induced velocity is a
function of thrust. So, let's figure out a way to solve for induced
velocity. The fluid flow analogy to F=ma is
where is density, A is the propeller swept area, V is the velocity at
the propeller, and V is the amount that the air is accelerated by the
propeller, the difference between the freestream and some point
downstream of the rotor where no more acceleration takes place. It's
pretty well known that at the propeller, the air has accelerated one half
of what it will do downstream (VI = 1/2 V). So, at the propeller, the
velocity is VA + 1/2 V. Substituting this into the equation above
yields:
Rearranging this equation into something that can be solved using the
quadratic equation yields:
Solving with the quadratic equation gives:
And remembering that VI = 1/2 V:
where the addition solution, not subtraction, gives the correct answer
for most conditions at which a propeller will be operating.
Now, let's go back to equation (1), and solve for thrust
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Substitute that back into equation (3):
Now we've got the three equations that we'll need to solve for thrust
for a given figure of merit. Taking the equation for Figure of Merit (2),
and solving for Power Available yields:
Substitute this into the equation for efficiency (1), and simplify to get:
Subsitute equation (5) into this to get:
Now, I'm sure we could go on further from here, solving for , but that
would be rather tedious, and the equation would get even messier
than it already is. So, from this point, I just built myself an Excel
spreadsheet, and used the Solver function to solve for . Once you
have that, it's a trivial matter to go back to equation (4) and calculate
your thrust.
Static Thrust
Static Thrust is a special case, since both airspeed and efficiency will
be zero. This makes the final equation above that we had derived
become invalid, since the denominator will be zero. But, it is extremely
easy to solve for induced velocity, and then thrust from there using the
F.O.M. equation. I will leave it up to the reader to go through the
derivation, but the resulting equation for thrust is:
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Conclusions
These have proven to be very useful calculations for my job when
designing propellers. They show the theoretical limit of just how much
thrust a propeller could be producing at any given airspeed, giving a
good bench mark for my designs. These calculations can also be
useful for getting a good understanding of propeller performance in
general. The graphs below were made using the equations derived
above. They illustrate the limitations of propellers, as well as some
general trends.
In the first graph, you can clearly see that even with the propeller
operating as well as it could, your efficiency is going to be lousy up
until you get to a decent airspeed, but in the second graph, you can
see that even with increased efficiency, your thrust drops off as
airspeed increases.
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The first of the next two charts shows just how important propeller
diameter is to static thrust. For the same horsepower, the amount of
static thrust that you can produce just keeps going up with diameter.
This increased thrust won't be nearly so marked throughout the whole
flight, however, as the second chart below illustrates. It can be seen
that even with diameters different by a factor of 2, both propellers
produced nearly the same thrust at 200 mph. Remember the equation
for efficiency (1) above. It has nothing to do with diameter. The max
possible efficiency is 100%, and as seen in the first graph above, once
you get up to higher airspeeds, you can start approaching that
efficiency even with a smaller propeller. These charts help to show
why helicopters use large rotors, and modern jet engines use high
bypass designs- it's a whole lot more efficient to get thrust by
accelerating a large amount of air by a little bit, than to acclerate a
small amount of air by a lot.
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