DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE TESTS OF CYCLOIDAL PROPULSION SYSTEMS

The cycloidal propeller, which can be described as a horizontal rotary wing, offers powerful thrust levels, and a unique ability to change the direction of the thrust almost instantly. In this work, cycloidal propulsion system was designed and implemented with sinusoidal low pitch system to investigate the fundamental characteristics of hovering states. Before experimental study, computational analysis was made in commercial CFD tool, CD Adopco/Star-CD. This work gives schematic view of flow field around rotor. And it predicts the load variation on a blade with respect to revolution and the total thrust from cycloidal rotor, at specific condition. CFD analysis also makes it possible to check the camber effect. The propulsion system was built up with sinusoidal low pitch control mechanism. Thrust, power and efficiency were measured for various conditions of parameter setting. It was accomplished by designing the equipment which can change the rotational radius, number of blade, phase angle of eccentricity and amplitude of eccentricity