Motor-Propeller Matching Research for Powered Parafoil

Motor-propeller matching plays a critical role in enhancing the efficiency of electric propulsion airplanes, especially for powered parafoil. This study firstly establishes models for the motor and propeller. A first-order DC motor model is implemented to characterize the motor properties, and a propeller model based on blade element momentum theory is utilized to analyse aerodynamic properties, with validation against experimental data. Secondly, two matching methods are developed. The graphical matching method visually obtains the matching points from the performance curve, and the surrogate model trained by the neural network directly compute the matching results. Finally, results from two matching methods are validated with the flight test data. Furthermore, the analysis reveals the motor-propeller efficiency of the tested powered parafoil system achieves less than 33%. Several suggestions are also proposed to improve the efficiency.