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.
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Propeller Gust ResponseRC Propeller Unsteady Aerodynamics Study
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Cai, Jielong, Sidaard Gunasekaran, and Michael V. Ol. "Sinusoidal Gust Response of RC Propellers at Different Incidence Angles." In AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum, p. 1536. 2022. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1536
