Aishwarya Srivastava, Steve Saliba, Josh Kloenne
Group K, 4:10 PM, Dr. Bixler
06 – Mar – 2015
System Analysis 3 introduced the team to a new and more effective way of testing the AEV’s propulsion efficiency which is the wind tunnel testing procedure. The team was made familiar with the testing equipment such as the speed controller, the power supply, the thrust stand and the speed indicator before starting the testing procedure on the wind tunnel. The main focus of this analysis was to obtain important parameters that would help in evaluating the behavior of the AEV for different input power settings. To achieve this, the aforementioned wind tunnel testing procedure was followed. The motor was given a set of power inputs and the output power was calculated as a function of the wind tunnel velocity and the propeller’s RPM. This raw data (except for the output power) can be found in Table 1 of the appendix. From this, the corresponding propulsion efficiency and the advance ratio of the vehicle were computed. All of this data was recorded and used for reference when plotting and observing the trend of all the values concerned.
Table 1 below shows the relevant data that was obtained from this lab:
Table 1: Wind Tunnel Data
Figure 1 below shows the plot of the power available to the motors as a function of the RPM of the propellers:
Figure 1: Power Available (Watts) vs. RPM
Figure 2 below shows the change in the propulsion efficiency vs. the advance ratio of the AEV:
Figure 2: Propulsion Efficiency vs. Advanced Ratio