While all parts of a submarine contribute to its overall performance, the propeller blade design is often neglected due to the difficulties in analyzing the impact in design changes combined with a lack of previous research in blade designs for the power and speed requirements as dictated by a human powered vehicle. To aid us in the design of our propeller, we have created a program to take a set of constraints as input, create a blade design using those constraints, use a combination of theories to get a performance metric for that blade using finite element analysis, and finally to output parameters required for the manufacturing of the blade and the calculated performance of that blade. This paper will discuss the techniques we used and the rational behind the tradeoffs we choose to use in our program, as well as how it and other supporting programs are allowing us to produce higher performance propellers and to continue to expand our knowledge in this area.
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