Adam, you might like to get hold of a copy of Prouty "Helicopter Performance Stability and Control". It is in imperial units, but is well layed out and covers all the stuff you need. There are newer texts, but it is always Prouty i refer back to.
It took me a while to get the "Coefficient of Thrust", "Solidity Ratio" and "Figure of Merit", but Nick patiently guided me through it.
Originally Posted by AdamFrisch
Basically, what I'm getting at - when you look at fanjet engine on an airliner, they have tremendous amounts of blades. There must be a reason for that - why don't they have just 2 fan blades if that's just as good?
That is actually a good question - and the only one not answered! A turbine stage is operating with bounded tips, albeit an idealistic simplification. This means that a pressure differential can exist across the stage without causing tip vortices. A helo rotor is in free space, so the tip vortices equalise the total pressure above and below (although blade surface will see pressure differential to produce lift). This means that while a tubine rotor must be designed to avoid leakage, a heli rotor is designed to optimise tip vortex induced flow. Thus the number of blades is greatly less in a heli rotor.
Before the introduction of Computational Fluid Dynamics aerodynamicists often produced suprisingly accurate results by modelling the flow field resulting from the tip vortices. Vortices have the characteristic of rotational velocity being inversely proportional to radius, outside of the vortex tube (so linear velocity is constant in the rotor plane). The field can be estimtated from an idealised tip vortex distribution (from observations usually) - you may be familar with the Biot-Savart equation from magnetic fields around coils from A-level phys. A tip vortex will stay in plane, until the following blade pushes it out of position. In fact the latest generation of rotor blades are optimised to position this vortex as far out from the rotor as possible, with no doubt further improvements to come.
Mart