Time and Date:

9:00am Monday, May 7th

Name:

Xiaofan Fei

Advisor:

Dr. Brian German

Committee Members:

Dr. Narayanan Komerath

Dr. Dimitri Mavris

Dr. Nicholas Borer

Dr. Leo Veldhuis

Title:

Advancing the Design of High-Lift Propeller Systems

Abstract:

High-lift propeller systems are powered high-lift devices that employ an array of leading edge propellers to augment the wing's effective lift coefficient. That each propeller has multiple installation and operational degrees of freedom makes the conceptual design of a high-lift propeller system quite difficult unless strict constraints are imposed to limit the design space. However, these constraints may unnecessarily limit lift augmentation performance, resulting in a waste of power. To advance the design of high-lift propeller systems, a wind tunnel experiment was conducted to better understand the effects of propeller installation geometry and operation variables on lift augmentation performance. The results were then used to develop an optimization problem formulation that can be efficiently solved to produce high-performing high-lift propeller system conceptual designs. A series of post-optimality studies is then proposed to elicit generalizable design trends to aid future design efforts