Modern helicopter rotor blades with non-homogeneous cross section composed of anisotropic material rquire highly sophisticated structural analysis. Variation in cross section geometry makes this task of analysis more complicated. Since rotor blades generally are much longer than their lateral dimensions, one-dimensional models seem feasible, at least from a computational point of view. Therefore determination of the principal coordinate system is very important to remove the structural coupling for one-dimensional beam modelling. In this study, shear center, and principal direction. The method will be verified by comparing the results with confirmed experimental results.