The purpose of the propeller lab was to determine what type of propeller configuration would result in the most efficient AEV. For the lab, the team decided to use four different configurations and test the performance of each. The configurations below are the four that were used, respectively: gray propellers configured for push, gray propellers configured for pull, black propellers configured for push, and black propellers configured for pull.
AEV Configured For Push with Black Propellers
AEV Configured For Pull with Black Propellers
Results
The black propellers required significantly less power to move comparative to the gray propellers, which showed that the black propellers were more energy efficient and thus better for the AEV design.
The black propellers also required significantly less power to travel much further than the AEV configured with the gray propellers. This was even more evidence that the black propellers were much better from a performance standpoint than the gray propellers.
Conclusions
The best propeller configuration was that of the two black propellers configured for pushing the AEV, rather than pulling. This configuration made the AEV objectively faster than the other propellers that had been considered, so much so that it had to be stopped before it exceeded the track limitations in terms of distance traveled, while the other configurations struggled to make the AEV move at all.