A Note on the Design of Wake-Adapted Propellers

Abstract

Problems associated with the design of wake-adapted propellers are illustrated by results obtained from a simple propeller and wake model. It is shown that the widely used approach of the vortex theory gives much-too-low induced axial velocities at the inner radii of the propeller, which results in too-low blade pitch ratios. The reason for this is that no regard is paid to the fact that the vorticity of the approaching flow is changed by the propeller. If this changing vorticity is introduced in the vortex theory, its shortcomings are eliminated. An effect of the improvement is that the effective wake at the propeller plane differs from the nominal wake. The difference depends upon the propeller load. The propeller is shown to have a leveling effect on a nonuniform axisymmetric nominal wake.