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• August 25, 2016 Create Date
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National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, Report - Full Scale Tests of Wood Propellers on a VE-7 Airplane in the Propeller Research Tunnel

The inrestigation described in this report was made primarily to afford a comparison between
propeller tests in the new Propeller Research Tunnel audflight tests and small model tests on, pro-
pellers. Three wood propellers which had been previously tested in flight on a Vii—’2’ airplane, and
of which models had also been tested in a wind tunnel, were tested again on a VE—7 airplane in the
Propeller Research Tunnel. The results of these tests are in fair agreement with those of the flight
and model tests.

Heretofore aerodynamic tests on propellers have been made either in flight or on small
models in a Wind tunnel. Full scale tests are highly desirable, but flight tests to obtain the
aerodynamic characteristics of propellers are difficult to make and have not been sufiiciently
accurate to be useful in bringing out small difierences in propellers.

The tests reported in this paper are the first Wind-tunnel investigations on full-size pro-
pellers. They were made in the 20-foot Propeller Research Tunnel of the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics, which is described in detail in Reference 1. Three wood pro-
pellers of standard N avy form were tested on a Vought VE—T airplane With 8. Wright 180 HP,
E—2 engine. These particular propellers were select-ed for this investigation because they had
been previously tested on a VE-7 airplane in flight (References 2 and 3) and models of the
propellers had also been tested with a model VE—7 airplane in the Stanford University wind
tunnel; thus, a direct comparison of the full—scale Wind tunnel results With the results of the
flight and the model tests was afforded.

In addition to the aerodynamic characteristics of the three propellers on the complete
airplane, the effects of the Wings and tail surfaces on the characteristics of one propeller were
measured at one angle of attack. Also, the angle of twist of one section of each propeller
was measured in operation.