Development of small propeller test bench system

Abstract

A set of performance analysis was performed on Master Airscrew 10X7 Electric propeller. The airfoil geometry was extracted by cutting and scanning a number of blade cross-sections. Experimentally, the test was performed at Institut Teknologi Bandung using 40 cm x 40 cm rectangular test section wind tunnel. The experimental rig was built using 3 load cells designed to measure thrust and torque. For data comparison, theoretical and numerical analysis were also done using Momentum-Blade Element method and Computational Fluid Dynamics. Compared with the previous study, the experimental data shows good agreement with most of the reference data. The theoretical data overestimated the thrust value by around 20% and underestimated the torque value by 30% at max, but the performance curve follows the similar trend with the experimental data. Both the thrust and torque value of the numerical data shows better agreement when fitted to experimental data by around 10%. While it may need more propeller samples analyzed to draw general conclusion, the three methods performed in this research showed analogous results and could be used for a particular stage of research depending on the level of accuracy needed.