INVESTIGATION ON AERODYNAMIC DESIGN OF VTOL AIRCRAFT PROPELLER

VTOL (Vertical Take-off and Landing) aircraft have no runway requirement, which can greatly reduce the dependence on land resources and space resources, and take off or land anywhere. This kind of aircraft relyon the propellers to achieve vertical take-off and landing, which is the state with the largest power consumption. The propeller with higher figure of merit (FM) can save energy consumption at hovering condition, thus extending the flight time. In order to improve the FM, the in-house codes SurroOpt are carrie dout to obtain optimal airfoils and blades, with the in-house PMNS2D and ROTNS as flow solver. In this paper, a series of air foils for VTOL aircraft propeller are optimized with the constraints of thickness and area to achieve geometric compatibility. The results show that the lift-to-drag ratio of the main air foil with 10%relative thickness is improved by 3.29%. In addition, the FM of propellers are improved by 1.33%, 2.09%,and 2.77%, with 4-bladed, 5-bladed and 6-bladed, respectively.