Blade element theory (BET) is a mathematical process originally designed by William Froude (1878), David W. Taylor (1893) and Stefan Drzewiecki (1885) to determine the behavior of propellers. It involves breaking a blade down into several small parts then determining the forces on each of these small blade elements. These forces are then integrated along the entire blade and over one rotor revolution in order to obtain the forces and moments produced by the entire propeller or rotor. One of the key difficulties lies in modelling the induced velocity on the rotor disk. Because of this the blade element theory is often combined with momentum theory to provide additional relationships necessary to describe the induced velocity on the rotor disk, producing blade element momentum theory. At the most basic level of approximation a uniform induced velocity on the disk is assumed:

Alternatively the variation of the induced velocity along the radius can be modeled by breaking the blade down into small annuli and applying the conservation of mass, momentum and energy to every annulus. This approach is sometimes called the Froude–Finsterwalder equation.

If the blade element method is applied to helicopter rotors in forward flight it is necessary to consider the flapping motion of the blades as well as the longitudinal and lateral distribution of the induced velocity on the rotor disk. The most simple forward flight inflow models are first harmonic models.

While the momentum theory is useful for determining ideal efficiency, it gives a very incomplete account of the action of screw propellers, neglecting among other things the torque. In order to investigate propeller action in greater detail, the blades are considered as made up of a number of small elements, and the air forces on each element are calculated. Thus, while the momentum theory deals with the flow of the air, the blade-element theory deals primarily with the forces on the propeller blades. The idea of analyzing the forces on elementary strips of propeller blades was first published by William Froude in 1878. It was also worked out independently by Drzewiecki and given in a book on mechanical flight published in Russia seven years later, in 1885. Again, in 1907, Lanchester published a somewhat more advanced form of the blade-element theory without knowledge of previous work on the subject. The simple blade-element theory is usually referred to, however, as the Drzewiecki theory, for it was Drzewiecki who put it into practical form and brought it into general use. Also, he was the first to sum up the forces on the blade elements to obtain the thrust and torque for a whole propeller and the first to introduce the idea of using airfoil data to find the forces on the blade elements.

In the Drzewiecki blade-element theory the propeller is considered a warped or twisted airfoil, each segment of which follows a helical path and is treated as a segment of an ordinary wing. It is usually assumed in the simple theory that airfoil coefficients obtained from wind tunnel tests of model wings (ordinarily tested with an aspect ratio of 6) apply directly to propeller blade elements of the same cross-sectional shape.

The air flow around each element is considered two-dimensional and therefore unaffected by the adjacent parts of the blade. The independence of the blade elements at any given radius with respect to the neighbouring elements has been established theoretically and has also been shown to be substantially true for the working sections of the blade by special experiments made for the purpose. It is also assumed that the air passes through the propeller with no radial flow (i.e., there is no contraction of the slipstream in passing through the propeller disc) and that there is no blade interference.

Consider the element at radius r, shown in Fig. 1, which has the infinitesimal length dr and the width b. The motion of the element in an aircraft propeller in flight is along a helical path determined by the forward velocity V of the aircraft and the tangential velocity 2πrn of the element in the plane of the propeller disc, where n represents the revolutions per unit time. The velocity of the element with respect to the air Vr is then the resultant of the forward and tangential velocities, as shown in Fig. 2. Call the angle between the direction of motion of the element and the plane of rotation Φ, and the blade angle β. The angle of attack α of the element relative to the air is then ${\displaystyle \alpha =\beta -\phi }$.

Applying ordinary airfoil coefficients, the lift force on the element is: