As part of my ongoing aircraft design project, I wrote another MATLAB function to produce propellers whose cross sections could be exported for making models in SolidWorks. The function takes inputs from the design calculations of an Excel spreadsheet. The diameter of the rotor, the number of blades, the twist of the blade, and the airfoils comprising the blade are all used to determine the shape of the propeller. For now, only straight tapered blades defined by a root and tip airfoil can be produced. But this code serves as a first step for designing and plotting more complicated blades with curved planforms and nonlinear twists. Right now the twists are user defined, whereas in reality the twist is set to produce a certain coefficient of lift stated in the Hamilton Standard propeller efficiency chart; this is something else that must be accounted for in the future.
I considered having this function calculate all performance parameters of the propeller, but the only performance estimation method that seemed feasible was the blade element method. This method is far less accurate than the Hamilton Standard propeller efficiency charts used to calculate performance in the Excel sheet. So I decided to stick with the standard method of propeller sizing using the propeller charts and just let my program calculate the propeller's shape.