Gust Encounters on Propellers
Research in this area examines how propellers respond when the incoming flow is no longer steady, especially in the forward-flight and edgewise-flight conditions that are increasingly relevant to UAVs, air taxis, and other distributed-propulsion systems. The work studies sinusoidal streamwise gusts, changes in rotor incidence angle, and tandem propeller arrangements to understand how thrust, power, and pitching response evolve when a propeller must operate inside a time-varying aerodynamic environment rather than a fixed one. A central result is that propeller gust response is shaped not only by the disturbance itself, but also by rotor orientation and by wake interaction between neighboring propellers.
Open Subcategory
