There is a spreadsheet available with test data from over 251 unique propellers frequently used on RC helicopters and RC quad copters. Dr Phil Millener, Chattanooga, Tennessee (RCGroups.com user “Dr Kiwi”) made a spreadsheet of test data from lots of commonly used RC airplane and quad copter propellers, and gave us permission to make the file available to you for download. For your convenience, there is also a reformatted version which only contains the results without any macros (available in .xls format and .csv format.)

This spreadsheet has over 13000 data points for different propellers. Each row contains the following information:

• Propeller Name
• Motor Used
• Gear
• Propeller Diameter
• Propeller Pitch
• Amps, Volts and Watts drawn
• RPM
• RPM as % of Kv * V
• Motor Weight
• Motor and Gearbox weight
• Thrust (in g and oz)
• Grams per Watt
• Pitch Speed

From this data, you can make a more educated choice on which propeller is best for your application. Looking at figures such as the number of grams per watt obtained can help you choose between similar propellers by giving you an estimate of which ones are more efficient in different situations. Depending on if you’re building a quad copter for hovering and aerial photography, or a high performance RC airplane, you can now get an objective picture of the differences between the propellers.

Because simulating how propellers perform in the real world is difficult, testing is necessary to measure their true performance. Before now, finding a unified source of data for many different propellers was difficult.

Here’s some example data, taken for an APC 8×6 E Thin Electric Propeller with a Hacker A20-22L brushless motor:

Volts Amps Watts RPM Thrust (g) g/W
10.9 13.55 148 8650 567 3.83
9.9 11.7 116 8100 484 4.17
8.9 9.85 88 7440 406 4.61
7.9 8.2 65 6780 333 5.12
6.9 6.65 46 6120 267 5.80

If you wanted to know how this propeller performs with this motor as RPM is increased, you could make a plot like this in any spreadsheet program.



Adding a trendline to the data allows you to make a prediction about the thrust this propeller and motor would provide at other RPM values. A simple polynomial fits the measured data well.

Another quantity you might be interested in is the efficiency of the propeller and motor in grams of thrust produced per watt of power used. Here is one such plot.



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