Quadcopter Propeller Design and Performance Analysis

In quadcopter design process, usually the selection of rotor and propeller are treated carefully because they will determine the maneuver abilities as well as the speed and maximum carry load. Among various methods used to choose the best combination of rotor and propeller, this research used Solidworks software computational method. The final result was compared with data-sheets of three commercial rotor specification for quadcopters in order to ascertain its validity. The designed propeller's size is 16 x 5 inch with two blades, and connected to a rotor having angular velocity between 1000 and 9000 rpm. In order to analyze the air pressure around propeller, Solidworks flow simulation was conducted. Information achieved from analyzed data show that the maximum thrust was 4144 g-force (gf), with propeller's coefficient thrust of 0.04. These data can be used to analyze the power efficiency in rotor propeller which is then useful in choosing the right size of propeller, according to the desired thrust.