In this experiment, a wind tunnel, under set air speed and power supply, was used to test the performance of a 3030 propeller in the pusher and puller configuration at intervals of motor power from 0% to 60%. This was done in order to analyze how the thrust capacity of each configuration changes at different Arduino power settings and how these compare to the propeller configuration.
After data was collected from the wind tunnels, calculations were made to determine other information about the propellers, such as thrust, power input, and power output, as well as propulsion efficiency and advance ratio. This data can be found in the appendix in Tables 1-2. A Propulsion Efficiency vs. Advance Ratio graph (appendix Figure 1) and a Power Setting vs. Calibrated Thrust graph (appendix Figure 2) were then created from this data in order to further analyze the performance of the propeller configurations.
Figure: 1A
Figure: 1B
Figure: 2A
Figure: 2B
A moving average line was chosen for the Propulsion Efficiency vs. Advance Ratio graphs in order to clearly define the most effective Arduino power setting, which was found to be around 15% for both the pusher and puller configurations.