Investigation of a four-bladed propeller inflow at yaw

Abstract

An investigation has been conducted which looks to understand the effect of yaw on the inflow of a 4-bladed propeller. Both experimental and numerical work has been conducted, with the test data used to validate and compare against the numerical methods. The numerical methods involve fully resolved CFD and the low-order Crigler method. Comparing at a yaw angle of 15°, good agreement is found between the numerical and experimental results with adjustments made to account for discrepancies between the setups. More work is still required in the experimental and numerical branches to improve the extraction of data with minimal losses and improve the fidelity of simpler methods without a great expansion of computer cost.