Ever since I tried to fly rubber powered models as a kid, I have had a keen interest in propellers.
In Delft, I followed the mesmerizing lectures by prof. Dobbinga on the subject. In retrospect, they were good Dutch translations and re-interprations of Glauert's classic treatment in Durand. Sadly, in the Delft curriculum it was not the habit to let students use the original literature.
I tried to apply Dobbinga's theory to my models, but frankly they never performed the way I hoped.
Years later, in a second hand book stall at an airshow on Old Warden aerodrome I found a loose binder with a photocopy of a hand written propeller code by Eugene Larrabee.
Around the same time "Scientific American" carried an article by Larrabee on the vast increase in performance of a paddle-shaped propeller over straight blades in the "Gossamer Condor" man-powered aircraft. It made the difference between a flight of 1 mile maximum and a flight from Crete to Santorini.
I tried my hand at implementing Larrabee's code, which was very similar to Dobbinga's lectures.
The code implemented classical propeller design in what turned out to be Adkins's version of Larrabee's version of Glauert's version in Durand of Betz's method from 1919.
I programmed the algorithm, first on Texas TI-58 calculators ( typing the inputs by hand, and plotting the data in pencil and Rotring ink on orange millimeter graph paper ), then on a Sharp MZ-700 MSX home computer which had three tiny color ball points plotting onto a tiny roll of paper, and finally on the early Microsoft PC's in Matlab. After that, life got in the way.
Recently, my interest was rekindled by a project at InHolland University in Delft to electrify a Dragonfly canard aircraft. Although I did not like the choice of aircraft, the project gave me the push to try my hand at writing a simple student textbook for InHolland on propeller theory.
The book project got out of hand, and led to my revisiting the whole of classical propeller theory and in particular the idea of optimizing the viscous loss along with the other losses, a problem which Glauert had solved only partly, and which I believe has since been mostly ignored. It became a chapter in the book which you will find on this website.
Another aspect which is normally not treated in the same breath as classical propeller theory is the lifting line vortex solution to the tip problem. This became a series of "new" chapters.
I cast the whole text into a paperback ready for printing, but then I decided to put the text on line here instead, for easier and free access. This changed the layout slightly.
The printed version is also still available if you are interested, just drop me a line.