Base Line Study for Determination of Effect of Stacking Sequence on Vibration Characteristics of Composite Propeller Blade

An investigation of a conventional propeller made from composite materials was conducted in which its vibration characteristics were studied. Optimized designing of a composite propeller was performed for various constrained and unconstrained design objectives. Only symmetric ply stacking sequences were considered. Results show that the ply stacking sequence has an effect on the characteristics of a conventional propeller. Proper stacking sequence of the composite propeller improves its performance as compared to its metallic counterpart. The finite element method is used to calculate the resulting natural frequency and mode shapes of the propeller blades. In the present study the shapes of the propeller blade is modelled as cantilever discretized into various number of hexahedral and pentahedral finite elements. Propeller vibration characteristics are calculated by ply orientation angles, for achieving the desired objectives Ansys and Radiosis solvers are used. From the results it can be made clear that by proper selection of optimum number of layers from 8 to 16 and tailoring the ply orientation angles operational frequencies of composite materials can be further enhanced and can be made much stiffer than metallic one.