Have you wondered which propeller is the best for your drone? While the drone hobby and business are getting much popular, there are more and more manufacturers offering dozens of different drone propellers. So it´s getting a real challenge to choose the right one for you multicopter.
Propellers can be made of plastic, wood, carbon or some other composite materials. Carbon propellers looks really great, but a quite expensive and sometimes hard to balance. Wood propellers are mostly used in bigger multicopters and typical for racing drones.
Depending on your frame and motors you need to figure out what is the maximum possible propeller you can use. Picking the wrong propeller can cause a motor over-burn or not enough “thrust to weight ratio” for your drone.
Considering the fact that it is highly time consuming to test all propellers on the drone racing market, I choose some very popular for a thrust test with the T-Motor F60 2200kv motor:
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Gemfan 5x4x3
- RaceKraft 5×4.5×3 Bluntnose
- RaceKraft 5×5.1×3
All propellers were tested at the same conditions, like air temperature, battery voltage etc. I used the best performing Aikon 30A BLHeliS ESC and a 4S LiPo 16.000mAh battery.
On the picture below you can find the maximum thrust results for a throttle range from 1300us – 2000us.
If you are going to build a racing drone with those F60 motors and 6” propeller you will get an amazing 6kg thrust.
Efficiency is also important for a propulsion system, so check which propeller performs best with this motor:
For those of you, who want the complete results, here you can find the excel sheet (incl. current, el. power and voltage).
Update: Some of you wanted to see how the RaceKraft propellers perform with the F60, so I ordered the RaceKraft 5×4.5×3 Bullnose and RaceKraft 5×5.1×3 for tests from n-factory.de. The form of the 5051 tri-blade propeller is interesting, but not optimal when trying to tightened the locknut. This one also didn´t perform very well for a 5.1″ pitch propeller (max thrust was 1179g). However the RaceKraft 5045 tri-blade prop achieved 1247g, which was the best result for a 4.5″ pitch propeller.
Hope you enjoyed reading this short propeller comparison. Can´t find the propeller you are using? Leave me a comment which one you want to be tested. Make sure to like our Facebook page, so you won´t miss any drone news.
