Welcome to PropGen
PropGen is a *FREE* CFD/CAD program for for the design and analysis of power-turbines and propellers in an arbitrary fluid or gas.
Given a set of user specified operating points and geometric constraints, PropGen will derive optimised planforms for aircraft propellers, wind turbines, marine propellers, and tidal power turbines - these devices are all governed by the same physics. PropGen can also be used for analysis of existing designs.
The program derives induced velocities via a relaxed trailing vortex method with with heuristic rules to account for the effects of wake dissipation. Layered on top of these computations are intelligence to: derive optimised designs, determine the setting needed to achieve specific power or thrust, and much more.
PropGen's aim is to make it easier to produce "quick start designs" optimised for a balance of efficiency, off-design performance, size, and other properties.
I hope you find this software useful.
Disclaimer
Wind-turbines and propellers are inherently dangerous devices and no prototype should be built without a solid understanding of structural, aeroelastic, materials, and related competencies. These devices can and will fail catastrophically if you don't know what you're doing.
Latest news
Beta software version 0.2.3 made available 21-Nov-2010.This release includes sample/starting designs for: terrestial aircraft propeller, marine propeller, a tidal turbine, a Mars aircraft, various stall regulated and pitch controlled wind turbines. Runs on Windows and Linux.
A comparison of PropGen with experimental data for the CER 10m wind turbine is available. This is considered a "challenge scenario" due to the deep stall operating conditions.
A sample propeller design for a Martian aircraft is included as an example of working with arbitrary fluids.
Please report bugs and feature requests!
