INTRODUCTION

When the engine for a new civil transport, the New Large Aircraft, was considered in Chapters 1 to 10 many assumptions were introduced to make the treatment as simple as possible. In the treatment of the engine for a New Fighter Aircraft in Chapters 13–18 the level of complexity was increased. This increase in complexity included allowing the properties of the gas to be different for burned and unburned air; the effect of the mass flow of fuel added to the burned air passing through the turbine was included; the effect of the cooling air supplied to the turbines was allowed for; and the effect of the pressure losses in the combustor, the bypass duct and the jet pipe were demonstrated. It is appropriate to recalculate the performance of an engine for the civil aircraft with some of these effects included.

Another difference between the treatment for the civil engine in Chapters 1–10 and the treatment for the combat aircraft was the mixing of the core and bypass streams upstream of the final propelling nozzle in the combat engine. Some engines on subsonic transport aircraft also have mixed streams; Fig. 19.1 shows photographs of an unmixed and a mixed engine on the wing of two contemporary aircraft, the Airbus-330 and Airbus-340-300. By a simple treatment it is possible to demonstrate the advantages which the mixed configuration brings.

INTRODUCTION

Figure 15.1 shows a cross-section through a modern engine for a fighter aircraft and the large differences between it and the modern engines used to propel subsonic transport aircraft, Fig. 5.4, are immediately apparent. Above all the large fan which dominates the civil engine, needed to provide a high bypass ratio, is missing. Engines used for combat aircraft typically have bypass ratios between zero (when the engine is known as a turbojet) and about unity; most are now in the range from 0.3 up to about 0.7 at the design point, though the bypass ratio does change substantially at off-design conditions.

This chapter seeks to explain why fighter engines are the way they are. It begins with some discussion of specific thrust, since this is a better way of categorising engines than bypass ratio; fighter engines have higher specific thrust than civil transport engines. Then the components of the engine are described, pointing out special features of components common to the civil engine, and giving a general treatment of the special features: the mixing of the core and bypass stream, the high-speed intake, the afterburner and the variable nozzle. A brief treatment of the thermodynamic aspects of high-speed propulsion leads into the constraints on the performance of engines for combat aircraft and the rating of engines.

In earlier chapters the cooling air supplied to the turbine was neglected in calculating the cycles, so too was the mass flow rate of fuel in the gas through the turbine.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will look only briefly at the design of the compressors and turbines for combat engines, following on from Chapter 9 for the civil transport engine. The flow Mach numbers inside the compressors tend to be higher than for the subsonic transport and this makes the treatment of each blade row rather special; the design rules must take account of the presence of strong shock waves. A very important design consideration is how the compressor will behave at off-design conditions since combat engines are off-design for so much of their operation. The problem arises because of the large density ratio between inlet and outlet of the compressor, and the reduction in this ratio when N/√(c pT0) is decreased. The turbine stages do not suffer from this off-design problem. The turbines are required to produce large work output in relation to the blade speed, that is Δh0/U2 must be high, but at off-design conditions for the engine the turbine condition is essentially unaltered from the condition at design. This, it may be recalled from Chapters 12 and 17, is because the turbines and the propelling nozzle are effectively choked, so the turbines are forced to operate at the same non-dimensional condition.

In this chapter the consideration will be based on the case 1 engine of Chapter 17, with fan pressure ratio 4.5 and HP compressor ratio 6.66 at design point, sea-level static.

History and regulation

As jet air transport increased in the 1960's the annoyance to people living and working around major airports was becoming intense. Regulations affecting international air transport are governed by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (icao), but this body was moving so slowly that in 1969 the US Federal Aviation Agency (faa) made proposals for maximum permitted noise levels. After extensive discussions in the USA these were formally approved as Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) Part 36 in 1971, retroactive with effect from 1969, but only for new aircraft. Shortly afterwards the icao Committee on Aircraft Noise published similar recommendations, to be known as Annex 16, a formal addendum to the 1944 Chicago Convention on Civil Aviation; each member state had then to accept the rules in Annex 16 and write them into their legal framework. The underlying principle for the noise certification of aircraft under FAR Part 36 and Annex 16 are similar and has remained unchanged ever since, with the levels under the US and icao rules subsequently becoming virtually identical.

The certification for noise relies on measurements at three positions, two for take off (referred to as lateral and flyover) and one for landing (referred to as approach). The levels are expressed in decibels (EPNdB) using effective perceived noise level (EPNL), described in outline below. The layout for testing is shown in Fig. A1.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter looks at some of the commercial requirements and background to the proposals to build a new civil airliner capable of carrying about 600 people. The costs and risks of such a project are huge, but the profits might be large too. In explaining the requirements some of the units of measurement used are discussed. Design calculations in a company are likely to assume that the aircraft flies in the International Standard Atmosphere (or something very similar) and this assumption will be adopted throughout this book. The standard atmosphere is introduced and discussed towards the end of the chapter. The chapter ends with brief reference to recent concerns about environmental issues.

SOME COMMERCIAL BACKGROUND

In December 2000 Airbus formally announced the plans to go ahead with a new large aircraft, dubbed the A380, intended in its initial version to carry a full payload (with 555 passengers) for a range of up to 8150 nautical miles. First flight is intended to be in 2004 and entry into service in 2006. There are already plans afoot for heavier versions, carrying more that 555 passengers and for all-freight versions with a larger payload. In December 2000 Airbus Industrie had received enough orders to justify the expected cost of over $10 billion, with an expected breakeven point with a sale of 250 aircraft. They forecast delivery of the 250th aircraft in 2011.

INTRODUCTION

A fighter aircraft is required to be agile, which requires it to turn sharply, to accelerate rapidly and usually to travel fast. It is no surprise that accelerating rapidly or travelling fast require large amounts of thrust from the engine. What may be more of a surprise is that rapid changes in direction require high levels of engine thrust. The reason is that the drag of the aircraft rises approximately with the square of the lift coefficient and making rapid turns demands high lift from the wings. An aircraft normally banks in order to turn so that the resultant of the gravitation acceleration and the centripetal acceleration is normal to the plane of the wings, Fig. 14.1, and the force they produce is exactly balanced by the wing lift. It is normal to express the increase in acceleration in terms of the load factor, denoted by n: a load factor of unity corresponds to an acceleration g perpendicular to the wing, when the lift is the normal weight of the aircraft, whereas a load factor of 5 corresponds to an acceleration of 5g and the lift is five times the weight. For a modern fighter aircraft structures are designed to withstand the approximate limit on acceleration set by the human pilot and load factors can be as high as 9.

For the civil airliner the turns are normally so gentle that the lift on the wings is little more than the weight of the aircraft, and the size of the engine is normally fixed by requirements at the top of the climb.

INTRODUCTION

The engine for a high-speed aircraft is required to operate over a wide range of conditions and some of these have been discussed in Chapters 13, 14 and 15. Of particular importance is the variation in inlet stagnation temperature, which can vary from around 216 K up to nearly 400 K for a Mach-2 aircraft. As a result the ratio of turbine inlet temperature to engine inlet temperature T04/T02 alters substantially, even when the engine is producing the maximum thrust it is capable of. In contrast, for the subsonic civil aircraft the value of T04/T02 changes comparatively little between take off, climb and cruise, the conditions critical in terms of thrust and fuel consumption, and it is normally only when a civil aircraft is descending to land or is forced to circle an airport that T04/T02 is reduced radically.

In Chapter 8 the dynamic scaling and dimensional analysis of engines was considered. There the engine non-dimensional operating point was held constant, for example T04/T02 is not constant, so the engine remained ‘on-design’. To designate the engine operating condition the value of N/√(c pT0) or any of the pressure ratios or non-dimensional mass flows could also be used, but T04/T02 has the intuitive advantage since engine thrust is altered by varying fuel flow rate to change T04. In Chapter 12 the more challenging issue of a civil engine operating away from its design condition was addressed, i.e. the case when T04/T02 ≠ constant, and the subject of this chapter is the similar case for military engines.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter returns to some general issues related to both civil and military engines. These are topics which can more satisfactorily be addressed with the background of earlier chapters.

CHOICE OF NUMBER OF ENGINES FOR CIVIL AIRCRAFT

The design for the New Large Aircraft assumed that there would be four engines and indeed the Airbus A380 does have four engines. When the first jet aircraft were beginning to fly across the Atlantic ocean four engines were necessary to cope with the possibility of loss in thrust in one engine at take off; to have had to accommodate loss of one engine with fewer than four engines would have involved carrying a lot of unnecessary engine weight (and available thrust) during cruise. Even when the Boeing 747 entered service around 1970, four engines were considered optimum for a transatlantic flight; the large twin-engine aircraft introduced by Airbus, the A300, seemed suited only to shorter routes. By the 1990s the most widely used aircraft on the transatlantic route were twin-engine aircraft, such as the Boeing 767 or Airbus 300, providing non-stop flights from, for example, London to Los Angeles (4700 nautical miles). The more recent twin, the Boeing 777, is used mainly for flights under 5000 nautical miles but the newer long-range version will have a range of 8810 nautical miles. It is reasonable to ask what has changed to make it possible and second what has made it attractive to use twin-engine aircraft on such long routes?

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 11 the performance of the main aerodynamic and thermodynamic components of the engine were considered. In earlier chapters the design point of a high bypass ratio engine had been specified and a design arrived at for this condition. At the design point all the component performances would ideally fit together and only the specification of their performance at this design condition would be required. Unfortunately engine components never exactly meet their aerodynamic design specification and we need to be able to assess what effect these discrepancies have. Furthermore engines do not only operate at one non-dimensional condition, but over a range of power settings and there is great concern that the performance of the engine should be satisfactory and safe at all off-design conditions. For the engines intended for subsonic civil transport the range of critical operating conditions is relatively small, but for engines intended for high-speed propulsion, performance may be critical at several widely separated operating points.

The treatment in this chapter is deliberately approximate and lends itself to very simple estimates of performance without the need for large computers or even for much detail about the component performance. The ideas which underpin the approach adopted are physically sound and the approximations are sufficiently good that the correct trends can be predicted; if greater precision is required the method for obtaining this, and the information needed about component performance, should be clear.

INTRODUCTION

Up to this point consideration has been given only to the design point of the engine. This is clearly not adequate for a variety of reasons. Engines sometimes have to give less than their maximum thrust to make the aircraft controllable and to maintain an adequate life for the components. Furthermore all engines have to be started, and this requires the engine to accelerate from very low speeds achieved by the starter motor. The inlet temperature and pressure vary with altitude, climate, weather and forward speed and this needs to be allowed for.

To be able to predict the off-design performance it is necessary to have some understanding of the way the various components behave and this forms the topic of the present chapter. It is fortunate that to understand off-design operation and to make reasonably accurate predictions of trends it is possible to approximate some aspects of component performance. The most useful of these approximations is that the turbines and the final propelling nozzle are perceived by the flow upstream of them as choked. Another useful approximation is that turbine blades operate well over a wide range of incidence so that it is possible to assume a constant value of turbine efficiency independent of operating point. These approximations make it possible to consider the matching of a gas turbine jet engine – how the various components operate together at the conditions for which they are designed (the design point) and at off-design conditions – and this will form the topic of Chapter 12.

INTRODUCTION

The creation of thrust is the obvious reason for having engines and this chapter looks at how it occurs. This is a simple consequence of Newton's laws of motion applied to a steady flow. It requires the momentum to be higher for the jet leaving the engine than the flow entering it, and this inevitably results in higher kinetic energy for the jet. The higher energy of the jet requires an energy input, which comes from burning the fuel. This gives rise to the definition of propulsive efficiency (considering only the mechanical aspects) and overall efficiency (considering the energy available from the combustion process).

MOMENTUM CHANGE

The creation of thrust is considered briefly here, but a more detailed treatment can be found in other texts, for example Hill and Peterson (1992). Figure 3.1 shows an engine on a pylon under a wing. Surrounding the engine a control surface has been drawn, across which passes the pylon. The only force applied to the engine is applied through the pylon. We assume that the static pressure is uniform around the control surface, which really requires that the pylon is long enough that the surface is only weakly affected by the wing. In fact we assume that the wing lift and drag are unaffected by the engine and the engine unaffected by the wing; this is not strictly true, but near enough for our purposes.

The emphasis of Part 1 of the book has been overwhelmingly towards the aerodynamic and thermodynamic aspects of a jet engine. These are important, but must not be allowed to obscure the obvious importance of a wide range of mechanical and materials related issues. In terms of time, cost and number of people mechanical aspects of design consume more than those which are aerodynamic or thermodynamic. Nevertheless this book is concerned with the aerodynamic and thermodynamic aspects and it is these which play a large part in determining what are the desired features and layout of the engine. Nevertheless an aerodynamic specification which called for rotational speed beyond what was possible, or temperatures beyond those that materials could cope with, would be of no practical use.

An aircraft engine simultaneously calls for high speeds and temperatures, light weight and phenomenal reliability; each of these factors is pulling in a different direction and compromises have to be made. Ultimately an operator of jet engines, or a passenger, cares less about the efficiency of an engine than that it should not fall apart. Engines are now operating for times in excess of 20000 hours between major overhauls (at which point they must be removed from the wing), and this may entail upward of 10000 take-off and landing cycles. In flight shut-downs are now rare and many pilots will not experience a compulsory shut-down during their whole careers.