Egregoros

The general idea is that the propeller blades are held *loosely* - and this has been approached in the past, there are patents going back to the 1940s. In fact modern drone blades are loosely held on hinges. The centrifugal force is enough that you don't need to hold tightly and not doing so eliminates a bunch of forces that you really don't want.

My precise structure is probably novel enough to be able to patent. If I were to patent it, my strategy would be to give it away to home builders / non-commercial and license it to anyone building an SLSA - and the license would come with test data that is collected on the hub.

>In fact modern drone blades are loosely held on hinges. The centrifugal force is enough that you don't need to hold tightly and not doing so eliminates a bunch of forces that you really don't want.

Small UAS prop blades are not articulated in any form, nor is it necessary due to their inherent low MMOI.

This said, you are correct in your assertion that rotor articulation, which is a standard feature on countless rotorcraft currently flying, allows the individual blades to droop, flap, lead & lag as needed to cancel out the insane centrifugal, centrepedal, gyroscopic & aerodynamic forces at play.

Unique rotorcraft, such as the V-22 Osprey, have a semi-hingeless system that, in the absence of the ability to lead or lag its blades as needed, compensate for that in the form of pendulum weights. The system can still droop & flap as required.

Other rotorcraft like the Bell 525 or the Sikorsky S-70/S-92 et al, use both full articulation and bifilar pendulum weights to cancel forces and assure a smooth ride.

That's normally more-or-less what you want. When you're taking off and the air is moving pretty slow, you need a fine pitch so that you can get the engine to max rev and make full horsepower.

But then when you're up in cruise, the air is moving past the blades a lot faster so to make the same thrust the engine would have to run much faster than it's designed for. So you want a sharper pitch to take a bigger bite out of the air.

And then if you want to save fuel, you want to slow the engine down from its max speed, so then you want the prop to take an even bigger bite out of the air.

Either you do this with a lever or you have a computer doing it for you...