Propulsive efficiency of boundary layer ingestion propellers

Paper in proceeding, 2018

The pursuit of lower fuel consumption for aircraft is promoting a departure from contemporary arrangements. One example is the development of more synergetic airframe and propulsion system designs, which are expected to increase significantly aircraft efficiency mainly by means of boundary layer ingestion. By integrating propulsion and airframe, both systems will significantly impact each other. This mutual interference requires the development of novel performance evaluation methods that consider such effects. This manuscript introduces a propulsive efficiency equation for boundary layer ingestion propellers based on the power balance method. Two formulations are presented for numerical and analytical evaluations. The equation is bounded between 0 and 1 and allows a meaningful evaluation of shaft to propulsive powers conversion, which results in an accurate determination of thrust and drag. This manuscript is the first advance of a project that will develop an optimizing tool for boundary layer ingestion propellers based on computational fluid dynamic simulations. The results will be presented in subsequent manuscripts.