A Study on Impact Damage Analysis of Composite Propeller Blade of Turboprop Aircraft

Abstract

Recently, the development need of environmental and fuel efficient aircrafts has been emphasized as an eco-friendly requirement in response to high oil prices. Accordingly, it is necessary to develop the next-generation eco-friendly and high fuel efficiency engine technology to enhance the fuel efficiency and aerodynamic performance of aircrafts for the purpose of reducing carbon dioxide emission amount prior to collecting and dealing with air pollution substances being discharged. In this study, development of the turboprop propeller blade for turboprop engine including aerodynamic and structural design and analysis was performed. The proposed propeller will be used as a candidate propeller for a regional aircraft which has been developed in Korea. Because the propeller for the target aircraft must endure the high bending and twisting moment loads during the flight operation, the high stiffness and strength carbon/epoxy composite material is used as a major structure materials. As a design procedure for the present study, firstly the structural design load is estimated through the aerodynamic load case analysis, and then flanges of spars from major bending loads and the skin from shear loads are initially sized using both the netting rule and the rule of mixture. In order to investigate the structure safety and stability, the structure analysis is carried out by finite element analysis using commercial code, MSC. NASTRAN. In addition, because the propeller should be safe against the bird strike, the bird strike phenomenon is analyzed using a commercial code, ANSYS.