High-altitude airship variable-pitch propeller performance analysis at multiple altitudes

To achieve better propulsion performance for high-altitude airships, this paper proposes a variable-pitch propeller design and performance analysis. Propeller surrogate models were constructed based on an in-house fluid–structure solver and validated by a wind tunnel experiment. Based on the surrogate model, this paper studied propeller performance under the common influence of propeller pitch variation and rotational speed, and proved the positive effect of the variable-pitch propeller on maintaining relatively high efficiency in large rotational speed range. This paper compared the performance of variable-pitch propellers and fixed-pitch propellers under the constraints of the motor. The results show that introducing variable-pitch propellers to high-altitude airships can significantly improve propeller performance at multiple altitudes and laminar wind speeds. And the potential of airship weight reduction brought by the variable-pitch technique is discussed as well.