In this paper, in order to clarify the gains of the shroud in the shrouded tail rotor system, a thrust division factor q , which represents the ratio of the shroud thrust to the total thrust of the shrouded tail rotor, is introduced. With the help of q , the slipstream theory for the static and axial flow states of the shrouded tail rotor are fully derived. Based on the sliptream theory, the variations of the thrust, power and disk area against q for different cases are emphatically analysed and the comparisons between a shrouded tail rotor and an isolated one are made. It is shown that, although the shroud can provide as much as 50% of the total thrust of shrouded tail rotor for the static state, the thrust gains of the shroud rapidly decrease for the axial flow state, which depends on the flow velocity ratio.
