Surprising behaviour of the wageningen B-Screw series polynomials

Abstract

Undoubtedly, theWageningen B-screw Series is the most widely used systematic propeller series. It is very popular to preselect propeller dimensions during the preliminary design stage before performing a more thorough optimisation, but in the smaller end of the market it is often used to merely select the final propeller. Over time, the originally measured data sets were faired and scaled to a uniform Reynolds number of 2 106 to increase the reliability of the series. With the advent of the computer, polynomials for the thrust and torque values were calculated based on the available data sets. The measured data are typically presented in the well-known open-water curves of thrust and torque coefficients KT and KQ versus the advance coefficient J. Changing the presentation from these diagrams to efficiency maps reveals some unsuspected and surprising behaviours, such as multiple extrema when optimising for efficiency or even no optimum at all for certain conditions, where an optimum could be expected. These artefacts get more pronounced at higher pitch to diameter ratios and low blade numbers. The present work builds upon the paper presented by the author at the AMT'17 and smp'19 conferences and now includes the extended efficiency maps, as suggested by Danckwardt, for all propellers of the Wageningen B-screw Series.