The UIUC Propeller Data Site is a tremendous resource maintained by Prof. Michael Selig and students at UIUC. A large number of propellers suitable for application to radio-control aircraft and small UAV's have been tested in the wind tunnel with the results reported in the data site.
The complete site may be downloaded in one large file These tools expect you to have downloaded this file and un-zipped it to some suitable location. These files expect to run from that location.
While the UIUC propeller data (say CT and CP vs. J) is contained in simple data files, the meta-data for each propeller (say diameter, pitch, and what RPM's were tested) is not explicitly provided. Instead, it is implied by the names of the files containing the data. Furthermore, multiple file names must be considered jointly to determine what data is available for a given propeller.
Although the data is presented in a largely consistent format, there are inevetible special cases that break strict consistency.
This layout style makes it very easy for a user to scan the database and to pull out the data they need about a particular propeller. Unfortunately, this style makes it rather challenging for a computer program to scan through and to work on the database as a whole.
These tools address that challenge. propDataBase() scans all the data file names in the database and parses the names into data fields for each entry. One of those entries can then be passed to parseProp() or plotProp() as desired.
PROPDB = propDataBase()Parses DB meta-data into struct array PROPDB.PROP = parseProp( DBENTRY )Parses data from DBENTRY into struct PROP.plotProp( DBENTRY )Plots propeller data from DBENTRY.
To use these tools, first call propDataBase() to parse the meta-data
for all the site into a vector of structs. Each entry in that vector
corresponds to a particular prop. The other tools accept a single
database entry as their argument.
propDB = propDataBase();
After parsing the complete meta-data, we pass entry 127 to parseProp to
parse the contents of the data files for that propeller into a structure.
prop = parseProp( propDB(127) );
Finally, we can plot the data for any database entry with plotProp.
plotProp( propDB(127) );
This software is Copyright (c) Rob McDonald 2021 and is released under the terms specified in the license.