Inverse Aerodynamic Design Procedure for Propellers Having a Prescribed Chord-Length Distribution

Inverse designmethods are elegant and efficient tools for the design of aerodynamic shapes like airfoils, wings, and propellers. In the case of propeller design, only a few general parameters have to be prescribed and the design procedure returns the propeller geometry in terms of chord-length and blade-angle distributions along the radius. The common design procedures require the prescription of the lift coefficient over the blade radius in order to obtain the unknown chord length. In this paper, a modified design method is presented that allows for designing optimum propellers having a prescribed chord-length distribution. Now the radial distribution of the lift coefficient becomes the unknown, which is determined by the design procedure.