On the Aerodynamic Design of the Boxprop

Doctoral thesis, 2018

Economic factors and environmental awareness are driving the evolution of aircraft engines towards increasingly lower fuel consumption and emissions. The Counter-Rotating Open Rotor (CROR) is actively being researched around the world, promising a significantly increased propulsion efficiency relative to existing turbofans by employing two, unducted, counter-rotating propeller blade rows, thereby increasing the bypass ratio of the engine and decreasing nacelle drag. Historically, these engines have been plagued by high noise levels, mainly due to the impingement of the front rotor tip vortices on the rear rotor. In modern designs, the noise levels have been decreased by clipping the rear, counter-rotating propeller. This comes at a cost of decreased efficiency.

An alternative, potential solution lies with the Boxprop, which was invented by Richard Avellán and Anders Lundbladh. The Boxprop consists of blade pairs joined at the tip, and is conceptually similar to a box wing. This type of propeller could weaken or eliminate the tip vortex found in conventional blades, thereby reducing the acoustic signature.

This thesis summarizes advances done in the research regarding the aerodynamics of the Boxprop. Aerodynamic optimization of the Boxprop has shown that it features higher propeller efficiency than conventional propellers with the same number of blades, but lower propeller efficiency than conventional propellers with twice as many blades. A key design feature of optimal Boxprop designs is the sweeping of the blade halves in opposite directions. This reduces the interference between the blades and allows the Boxprop to achieve aerodynamic loading where it is most efficient - close to the tip.

A Wake Analysis Method (WAM) is presented in this work which provides a detailed breakdown and quantification of the aerodynamic losses in the flow. It also has the ability to distinguish and quantify the kinetic energy of the tip vortices and wakes. The Wake Analysis Method has been used to analyse both Boxprop blades and conventional propeller blades, and insights from it led to a geometric parametrization and an optimization effort which increased the Boxprop propeller efficiency by 7 percentage points.

Early Boxprop blades did not feature a tip vortex since aerodynamic loading near the tip was relatively low. The optimized Boxprop blades have increased the aerodynamic loading near the tip and this has resulted in a vortex-like structure downstream of the Boxprop at cruise conditions. This vortex is significantly weaker and of different origin than the tip vortex of a conventional propeller.

A CROR featuring the Boxprop as its front rotor (BPOR) has been designed and its performance at cruise is competitive with other published CRORs, paving the way for future work regarding take-off performance and acoustics.