PropDesigner

Propellers are critical components of various types of vehicles, including aircraft, boats, and submarines. The performance of these vehicles is often tied directly to the efficiency and geometry of the propellers. An inefficient propeller design can lead to poor aerodynamics, excessive noise, increased energy consumption, and overall reduction in performance. Hence, there is a high demand for optimal propeller designs. Traditional approaches for propeller design often involve manual, trial-and-error methods, or they simply apply a one-size-fits-all approach to various vehicles. These methods lack precision and do not take full advantage of the capabilities of modern computational optimizations. Moreover, a failure to adequately account for specific design parameters and performance variables can result in blades that are suboptimal for their intended uses.

Technology Description

The technology offers processes for optimizing the geometry of a blade used in a propeller. It employs an optimization routine that generates and assesses new blade geometries on the basis of structural parameters. For a proposed blade geometry, it calculates performance parameters, including aerodynamic performance measures, far-field acoustic parameters, and electrical power requirements to operate a propeller having the proposed geometry. What distinguishes this technology is its attention to detail and comprehensive approach to design. It incorporates user input, allowing designers to influence the weighting of various design parameters. The optimization routine utilizes one or more surrogate algorithms to map a design space of the weighted values and identifies their local minima. Upon determining an optimized blade geometry, the process uses a gradient-based algorithm to continue generating new blade geometries and identifies the global minima of the design space.