An actual question my five year old asked me and I couldn’t answer, please help!
In: Physics
Imagine you have an airplane, and you want to move it forward, so you tie a rope to the front of it and pull it. The plane rolls forward.
If you want to move it forward faster, you need to give the rope a harder pull.
But there’s a problem: The harder you want to pull the rope, the thicker of a rope you’ll need. The bigger the rope is, the bigger of a pull you can give your airplane to make it go faster. But as you can imagine, the harder you want to pull, the stronger you need to be, and the more effort it takes to pull.
This is (very basically) how a plane moves forward. (How it moves upwards is a different story). But instead of a rope, you have a propellor. A propellor takes the air in front of the plane and pushes it really hard behind the plane. This moves the plane forward.
The more air the propellor can move, the more it moves the plane. It can either do this by turning faster, or by being bigger, or both. Just like the rope though, if you want a bigger propellor, or to turn it faster, you need more energy.
One of the ways you can make a propellor larger is by having more blades. You can also keep the same number of blades but make them larger/longer. An aerospace engineer could weigh in more on how specifically the different changes to the propellor affect performance, but in general: bigger propellor = more air moved = bigger push.
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