Aerodynamic analysis of propellers mounted to the tip of a wing.

What is it about?

Propeller propulsion systems can enable a step-change improvement in fuel consumption and emissions of future aircraft. The increased design flexibility offered by technologies such as hybrid-electric propulsion enables novel approaches to positioning propellers on aircraft, and can be exploited to achieve integration benefits. This paper studies the aerodynamic effects of mounting the propeller on the wingtip. It is shown that the wingtip-mounted propeller offers a significant aerodynamic benefit over the conventional propeller-wing configuration (with the propeller mounted on the inboard part of the wing), with drag reductions in the order of 15%.

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