An Experimental, Analytical and Numerical Investigation of Static Performance of an Electromotor Driven Propeller with Application in UAVs

Because of various applications of UAVs, research in this field has been developed increasingly in recent years. Propeller has considerable importance as a key factor in producing propulsion in such vehicles. Having information about a propeller’s performance variations in different operational conditions is very important in order to choose a suitable propeller for a predefined mission of the flying vehicle. For this aim, in this research a test stand was designed and fabricated to evaluate the static performance of electromotor driven propellers with application in UAVs. After collecting data by performing experimental tests, the results were compared to those obtained from the numerical and analytical techniques. In order to verify the results, a propeller was modeled and a computational method was applied based on k-ε, RNG turbulence model. The comparison of experimental, analytical and computational results shows an acceptable agreement between them. According to the results, the difference between analytical and empirical results is 0.4%, the difference between computational and empirical results is 0.3% and the difference between analytical and computational results is about 1.23%. Also in the range of the rotational speed of the propeller, the difference between computational and empirical results became less than 10% in most cases, implying the validity of the applied computational method and correctness of experimental test procedure.