What is the moving air in a jet engine supposed to look like when the fan blades have a wavy leading edge?

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A lot of different jet engines I see will have fan blades with really complex and curvy shapes. When an aerospace engineer designing a jet engine comes up with that fan blade shape: What’s the moving air (in simulation or air-tunnels) supposed to look like? And why?

For that matter what is the engineer who designs a simple box fan doing when they make the blades curve to be wider at the edge and stuff? I’m assuming these designs move the air better then a straight blade but why? What’s the airflow look like?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

One factor is that the end of the blade is moving faster than the part nearer the hub. So different parts of the blade need to be designed for different airspeeds. That will possibly need variation of both the chord, the distance from leading to trailing edges, and the angle of attack that the blade meets the air, along the length going from hub to tip. The design also needs to take into account the centrifugal effect of air being flung outwards by the spin so the housing factors in too.

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