Optimal Propeller Blade Design for a Quad-Tilt-Wing UAV

In this study, an optimal propeller design has been conducted for the quad-tilt-wing unmanned aircraft called QTW, which is being developed by JAXA. Considering the power consumption during both hovering and forward flight, a blade design proposal was obtained that is expected to reduce the average power consumption over the entire mission by approximately 28%. An important aspect of this study is that it involves a fixed-pitch propeller, demonstrating an example of propeller design that takes into account the feasibility under two conditions with different advance ratios, without the ability to adjust the pitch angle. An in-house CFD solver rFlow3D is used to evaluate propeller performance, and a method combining the Kriging model and Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) is applied for optimization process. This approach allows us to search for the optimal solution efficiently within the defined design space.