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Stan Hall
Technical Advisor, Engineering, EAA Chapter 62
To get the most life from an aircraft engine while at the same time getting acceptable airplane performance the engine manufacturers commonly
recommend their engines not be operated continuously over 75% of their full throttle rpm. We have thus come to accept this rpm as a standard
"cruising" rpm.
The problem is, how does the pilot of an airplane equipped with a fixed pitch prop know when he is pulling 75% since the only power-related
instrument he has is the tachometer and the tach doesn't tell him directly?.
So, the question arises, to throttle back to 75% power should he come back 25% of the distance the cockpit control provides? No, because the
only point on the throttle he knows at least roughly what the power is, is full throttle. Or, should he throttle back to 75% rpm as shown by the
tach? No again because the relationship between prop rpm and engine rpm is far from linear. It is, in fact, exponential. The power absorbed by a
fixed pitch propeller is proportional to the cube of its rpm. Thus, if he reduces the rpm by a quarter he can expect a power reduction of almost a
third - and an IAS far less than he had anticipated.
But the tach can indicate the power - you can mark it. A way to determine where to put the tach to yield a 25% power reduction is to refer to the
graph shown here. Enter the full throttle (F.T.) level flight prop rpm on the left and draw a horizontal line to the right to intersect with the line
labelled 75% F.T. hp then down. Read the part-throttle rpm at the bottom. An example using the Super Cub PA-18-150 is shown. At 2700 full
throttle rpm the graph shows the rpm at 75% F.T. power to be 2451 rpm. The Super Cub's owner's handbook shows 2450 rpm.
The graph is based on the use of the so-called "Propeller Load" equation which is.
HP2 = HP1 (RPM 2 /RPM 1 )3 (eq. 1)
where HP2 = part-throttle hp, HP 1 = full throttle hp, RPM2= part-throttle rpm, RPM 1 = full throttle rpm
Since we're looking for RPM2 we rewrite the equation to:
RPM 2 = (RPM 13(HP2/HP1))1/3
(eq. 2)
Something interesting happens here. Note that HP2 / HP1 is a ratio of two horsepowers, not the horsepowers themselves. Since for the 75%
power case the ratio is .75 we rewrite the equation again and get:
RPM2 = (RPM 13 x .75)1/3 (eq. 3)
This is the equation upon which the graph is derived. What this new equation says is, the only things you need know to determine the Part throttle rpm are the full throttle rpm and whatever percent of full throttle power you choose. The actual horsepower isn't directly involved except