This research presents a framework to investigate aeropropulsive integration of propellers for sustainable aviation. Focused on rapid early-design phases, the framework enables characterization of aeropropulsive effects from high-level parameters within typical product-development time constraints. The workflow has two main entities: the Standard Model Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica—Brazil (SMI), an interchangeable aircraft reference that supports comparative studies of dominant aeropropulsive effects across different aircraft configurations; and a generic multifidelity methodology that can integrate aerodynamic data from theoretical models and wind-tunnel tests by leveraging only 3D coefficients. The methodology computes longitudinal characteristics by estimating local angle of attack and dynamic pressure at the tail using 3D-equivalent parameters. For rear-mounted propeller installations, it also computes the averaged propeller slipstream at the pylon while determining the propeller inflow angle through in-plane force analysis. Aerodynamic data for SMI were obtained from computational fluid dynamics Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (CFD RANS) for power-off conditions and Flightstream ® for powered cases. The comparative study evaluates static stability and pitch damping as key engineering metrics. Findings reveal that the propeller in-plane force strongly impacts stability, with wing-mounted configurations showing significant reductions, whereas rear-mounted designs remain inherently more stable. By including dominant aeropropulsive effects earlier in aircraft sizing, the framework reduces development risk and supports more efficient and sustainable propeller-driven designs.
Neves et al. (Sun,) studied this question.