Abstract
The blades of flexible propellers are formed by overlaying and adhering many layers of thin glass-fiber fabric sheets, are compressed and dried in the rigid mold. The current manufacturing process can not avoid the rather irregular deformation of the blades composed of non-isotropic non-uniform fabric structures, and inevitably introduces the different shape-forming errors between blades. In this paper, several flexible model propellers are precisely measured with three-dimensional optical instrument and compared with the original design geometry. The model propellers with the as-measured geometry are evaluated with the lifting-surface-theory-based propeller analysis code. The open-water performance are presented and discussed. The importance of the manufacturing accuracy is addressed to be able to apply the flexible propellers for propulsion of marine vehicles.
