Resonant Whirling of Aircraft Propeller-Engine Systems

At a critical speed, a light aircraft can experience severe vibrations in steady flight in which the propeller blades vibrate at one frequency while the engine block vibrates at a lower frequency. A model is presented which explains this phenomenon. A three-bladed propeller-engine system is considered to have six rigid-body degrees of freedom plus six blade vibration degrees of freedom. This system is analyzed and simplified by introducing a constraint based on observation of the flight phenomenon. Multiblade coordinates are introduced and a linear eigenvalue problem is derived which describes whirling motions of the engine coupled to progressive waves of blade deformation which circle the propeller disk. These whirling motions are excited by harmonics of the transverse forces on the engine due to the explosive gas pressures in the cylinders. The effects of varying the propeller blade pitch angle are studied and a high-speed instability mechanism is examined.