In terms of specific fuel consumption, propellers are more economic than jet engines at low speeds (<0.5 Mach) but at high speeds, the propeller blade tip reaches locally to supersonic speeds which results in wave drag and loss of efficiency. Since supercritical airfoils are designed primarily to delay the onset of wave drag in the transonic speed range. Why we haven't used supercritical airfoil sections for propeller blade designs?
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4$\begingroup$ Do you know for a fact the we haven’t? There are some pretty advanced propeller designs out there on modern turboprop aircraft, I’m pretty confident that many smart engineers have squeezed every possible bit of inefficiency out of these new designs. $\endgroup$– Michael HallJul 6, 2022 at 14:52
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