What are you arguing? All these are straw-man arguments. Sigh.
Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
- Start date
What are you arguing? All these are straw-man arguments. Sigh.
Hyperwarp
Captain
WS-10 series has made steady progress after the initial hiccups, but there is long road ahead. Remember they are playing catch-up. Dates below are for beginning service succesfully and not prototypes or testing.
WS-10A: 125kN, J-11B (2009)
WS-10B: 132kN J-10B (2015)
WS-10A v2?: 134kN, FADEC Latest batches of J-11B/BH (2014/15?)
Compare that to,
US:
F110-GE-100: 125kN F-16 (1986?)
F110-GE-129: 131kN F-15K (2005)
F110-GE-132: 145kN, F-16 Block 60 (2005)
F119-PW-100: 156kN, TVC F-22 (2005)
F135-PW-100: 190kN F-35A (2016)
Russia:
AL-31F: 123kN Su-27 (1985)
AL-31FP: 123kN, TVC Su-30MKI (2002)
AL-31FN: 125kN J-10A (2004)
AL-31FN Series 3: 135kN J-10B (2013)
AL-41F1S: 142kN, TVC Su-35 (2014+)
AL-31F unknown variant: 137kN (139kN?) J-20 (2016)
Excluded the AL-41F1 @ 147kN since the PAK-FA is still in testing.
From the major problems with the original WS-10 (132kN) in 2007, there has been steady progress. The key here is the WS-15. I really hope we get to see something, at least some ground test footage of it at Zhuhai 2016. Even if they reach 155kN with 3D TVC that'll be a huge boost for the J-20.
WS-10A: 125kN, J-11B (2009)
WS-10B: 132kN J-10B (2015)
WS-10A v2?: 134kN, FADEC Latest batches of J-11B/BH (2014/15?)
Compare that to,
US:
F110-GE-100: 125kN F-16 (1986?)
F110-GE-129: 131kN F-15K (2005)
F110-GE-132: 145kN, F-16 Block 60 (2005)
F119-PW-100: 156kN, TVC F-22 (2005)
F135-PW-100: 190kN F-35A (2016)
Russia:
AL-31F: 123kN Su-27 (1985)
AL-31FP: 123kN, TVC Su-30MKI (2002)
AL-31FN: 125kN J-10A (2004)
AL-31FN Series 3: 135kN J-10B (2013)
AL-41F1S: 142kN, TVC Su-35 (2014+)
AL-31F unknown variant: 137kN (139kN?) J-20 (2016)
Excluded the AL-41F1 @ 147kN since the PAK-FA is still in testing.
From the major problems with the original WS-10 (132kN) in 2007, there has been steady progress. The key here is the WS-15. I really hope we get to see something, at least some ground test footage of it at Zhuhai 2016. Even if they reach 155kN with 3D TVC that'll be a huge boost for the J-20.
superdog
Junior Member
"So underpowered" but how much exactly? "Piss poor loadout" as in 8 heavy AT missiles and two rocket pods? And you're so sure it has no active ECM or warning systems because you've read its user manual? You want people to believe that the PLA has a habit to mass equip attack helicopters with no armor, no warning system, "piss poor loadout", and "crippling handicap"? I think you're making extreme assumptions with inadequate support purely for the sake of argument.
Let's make the more realistic assumption that whatever engine the WZ-10 is using now is not as good as the PT6C. It is fair to say they don't have an engine as powerful as they wanted. How does this prove your claims that:
"to this day they just couldn't put forward even one series-production engine model that's at least just a generation behind the Western's latest"
or
"It's almost 4 decades now and China still at most could only produce CG model and mockup"
or
"China made 2 or 1.5 steps while the rest of the world made 3 if not 4"
???
Whatever you are question me here regarding the WZ-10 has nothing to do with your absurd claims. I did not claim that China's engine development has been so good it has always met all their needs. But it was you who claimed that China did not serial produce ANY engine that can be considered current or last gen. It was you who claimed that all China could make were CG or mockups. It was you who suggest that China's engine development is not catching up but further falling behind, implying that they would be closer to world standards decades ago than they're now.
Please provide valid, logical support for these claims. Or you could choose to admit that your claims has no objectivity, they're mainly emotional rants.
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MwRYum
Major
And who's the one that brought up the WZ problem eh? Isn't that YOU? That's still falls under this topic's envelop and something nobody denies that China still has yes broken through the bottleneck - or, they somehow for some reason withheld the press statement. WZ-10 has hardly, if ever, seen with full loadout, mostly just empty racks, even in reels of live-firing combat exercises. But saying anymore about this will be off-topic, mind you (and myself)."So underpowered" but how much exactly? "Piss poor loadout" as in 8 heavy AT missiles and two rocket pods? And you're so sure it has no active ECM or warning systems because you've read its user manual? You want people to believe that the PLA has a habit to mass equip attack helicopters with no armor, no warning system, "piss poor loadout", and "crippling handicap"? I think you're making extreme assumptions with inadequate support purely for the sake of argument.
Let's make the more realistic assumption that whatever engine the WZ-10 is using now is not as good as the PT6C. It is fair to say they don't have an engine as powerful as they wanted. How does this prove your claims that:
"to this day they just couldn't put forward even one series-production engine model that's at least just a generation behind the Western's latest"
or
"It's almost 4 decades now and China still at most could only produce CG model and mockup"
or
"China made 2 or 1.5 steps while the rest of the world made 3 if not 4"
???
Whatever you are question me here regarding the WZ-10 has nothing to do with your absurd claims. I did not claim that China's engine development has been so good it has always met all their needs. But it was you who claimed that China did not serial produce ANY engine that can be considered current or last gen. It was you who claimed that all China could make were CG or mockups. It was you who suggest that China's engine development is not catching up but further falling behind, implying that they would be closer to world standards decades ago than they're now.
Please provide valid, logical support for these claims. Or you could choose to admit that your claims has no objectivity, they're mainly emotional rants.
So, superDOG, are you going to keep haggling me like an avatar of Hillary/Trump so we both gonna spend a few months in the "cooler", or agreed to disagree and get back to topic?
OTI did post this article way back when just to refresh it I re post it again still available from bloomberg
This is the engine that get delay and still face problem. This is just one engine which is more than the total capitalization of the new Chinese engine company of 7 billion $. Now think of GE, Honeywell, Lycoming? How much are they spending?
The Little Gear That Could Reshape the Jet Engine
A simple idea’s almost 30-year, $10 billion journey to the aircraft mainstream.
The Jet Engine of the Future
Pratt & Whitney’s new PurePower Geared Turbofan aircraft engines are impressive beasts. Scheduled to enter commercial service before the end of the year, they burn 16 percent less fuel than today’s best jet engines, Pratt says. They pollute less. They have fewer parts, which increases reliability. And they create up to 75 percent less noise on the ground, enabling carriers to pay lower noise fees and travel over some residential areas that are no-fly zones for regular planes. Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, Irkut, and Mitsubishi have certified the engines for use on their narrowbody craft. JetBlue, Lufthansa, Air New Zealand, Malaysia’s Flymojo, and Japan Airlines are among the engine’s 70 buyers in more than 30 countries.
To people outside the aircraft business, what may be most remarkable about the engines is that they took almost 30 years to develop. That’s about 15 times as long as the gestation period of an elephant and unimaginably longer than it takes to pop out a smartphone app. Could Pratt have gotten the hardware out faster? Probably. But industrial innovation on the scale of a commercial jet engine is inevitably and invariably a slog—one part inspiration to 99 parts perspiration.
In Pratt’s case, it required the cooperation of hundreds of engineers across the company, a $10 billion investment commitment from management, and, above all, the buy-in of aircraft makers and airlines, which had to be convinced that the engine would be both safe and durable. “It’s the antithesis of a Silicon Valley innovation,” says Alan Epstein, a retired MIT professor who is the company’s vice president for technology and the environment. “The Silicon Valley guys seem to have the attention span of 3-year-olds.”
Graphic by Bloomberg Businessweek; Data: Compiled by Bloomberg
The PurePower GTF began to take shape in 1988, when Pratt staffers in East Hartford, Conn., including a 28-year-old engineer named Michael McCune, started developing a gizmo to slow the fan—the big rotating blades at the front of the engine that provide most of a jetliner’s propulsion. For planes flying at typical speeds, a slow fan that moves large volumes of air at a moderate velocity is more efficient than a fast-spinning fan that accelerates a smaller volume of air. (The slow fan’s also quieter.)
The problem was that the fan was attached to the same shaft as two other parts of the jet engine, the low-pressure turbine and low-pressure compressor. Those parts would be more efficient if they ran faster, not slower. Sharing a shaft was a compromise that hurt each part’s performance and left nobody happy.
The solution McCune and his co-workers pursued was one that had already been used successfully on turboprop planes: a gearbox between the shaft and the fan that lets the fan run slower while the compressor and turbine run faster. The gearing approach hadn’t been tried at the scale of a commercial jetliner because the conventional wisdom was that it would be too heavy and wear out too quickly. “We started studying all gearboxes in service” to determine what the obstacles really were, says McCune.
The biggest challenge in scaling up was how to keep the gearbox, which is about 20 inches in diameter and weighs about 250 pounds, from being torn apart if there was a shock that wrenched the fan in one direction and the shaft in another. Adding steel for stiffness would make the engine too heavy. To put some give into the system, McCune’s team attached the gearbox rigidly to the fan but somewhat loosely, with bendable metal baffles, to the compressor/turbine shaft and the engine case.
Pratt engineers borrowed technology and ideas from other divisions of parent United Technologies: notes on gears from Sikorsky, which makes turbine-powered helicopters; bearing know-how from Pratt & Whitney Canada, which makes the geared PT6 engine for smaller turboprop aircraft; and simulations of how lubricants move through the gear from the United Technologies Research Center. It also got special parts from Timken, the 116-year-old bearing maker, and permission from NASA to use its wind tunnels in California and Ohio.
At times, the extent of the operation had to be protected from bean-counting Pratt executives, says Epstein. “Sometimes we spent a lot. In other years we hid him [McCune] behind the curtain and slipped him some sandwiches so management wouldn’t know what the investment was,” he jokes.
By 2008 the engine was ready for testing. Pratt engineers deliberately broke a prototype, letting a fan blade fly off to test whether the accident would destroy the gears. Afterward, Epstein says, “we took the gearbox apart, and it looked brand-new. You could even see the machining marks on the gears.”
“There were a lot of false starts there, but they knew they had a concept that would work,” says Ernest Arvai, a partner in commercial aviation consultant AirInsight. “I’m amazed that they kept the research going as long as they did. I think they’ve got a winner there.”
Epstein gives much of the credit for the project to McCune, who has 66 patents to his name. “Mike has succeeded in what many people thought was an impossible challenge,” he says.
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One consequence of the engine’s decades-long development is that it’s missed the window to be considered for inclusion on the latest generation of widebody jets, says George Ferguson, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. In the more important market for narrowbody jets, Ferguson says, the large fan makes the engine too big for Boeing’s 737 Max, which has low wings. On the plus side, Pratt & Whitney has fought General Electric nearly to a draw on airlines’ orders for engines for the Airbus A320neo family (46 percent vs. 54 percent, respectively, among orders in which an engine was chosen). And the PurePower GTF is the exclusive engine for the new narrowbodies from Bombardier, Embraer, and Mitsubishi. The jet engine market-share war plays out over decades. Speaking of the new engine, United Technologies Chief Executive Officer Gregory Hayes told analysts earlier this year: “Long-term, we like where we are.”The bottom line: The GTF’s almost 30-year incubation period cost Pratt some big customers, but the engine’s efficiency has attracted other
The principles and advantages of geared fans were understood long before P&W started this development, so they were right to delay this as long as they did waiting for technology to grow. Even so it cost them nearly thirty years.
superdog
Junior Member
Well, I thought someone who made such glaring claims about Chinese engine development would at least have the basic knowledge that, when we talk about Chinese engines, WZ doesn't mean WuZhi (attack helicopter), it means WoZhou (turboshaft). The WZ series and QC series are both lines of Chinese gas turbine engines, just like the WS series, the WJ series, and the QD series.
So it appears that you're not familiar with the naming classification of Chinese engines, and that made you think I was 'off topic'. I'm sorry I didn't specify it more clearly for you in my previous post. I hope the above explanation would suffice this time.
You seem a bit agitated because I raised serious doubts about your claims. I'm a long time follower of Chinese engine development, I doubt your words because they contradicts severely with what we know about Chinese engines (other members has already pointed out some contradictory example). When I said your words could be out of an emotional rant, that could have made you think that my whole post was there to mock you. I apologize for that, as that was not what I intended to do. Let me make myself clear: I sincerely hope that you can provide some solid evidence to prove your extraordinary claims, so that everyone can learn from what you know. To makes things fair, if you want to continue this discussion, I can also explain to you why I think the WZ and QC series provide some of the proofs that your claims are NOT TRUE.
I'm sure this is very on topic, do you want to go on and share your evidence?
b787
Captain
actually you spoke too fast.
XF-5 has a TWR of 7.8:1, so basically Al-31 has the same TWR, the Japanese engine actually is lighter, much much lighter than WS-10 or Al-31, but its TWR is as good as Al-31, so i was wrong it is not 9:1, in that you are right, but you are wrong because the XF-5 basically has the same TWR of a 4th generation engine, plus Japan has an engine with TVC, and they are flying it now, China only has rumous in that regard, no aircraft i have seen it with TVC.
So in terms of technology Japan has matched China`s WS-10 and its midget XF-7 also powers the operational Xp-3.
The only thing i am saying is other countries are developing advanced technologies.
Kaveri is the same it has a TWR of 7.8:1, so it is also a 4th generation engine.
The Brazilian engine TJ-200 also has a very high TWR, it can develop 220 lb of thrust just weighs less than 25 lb, so it is in its category a very advanced engine.
But true TJ-200 is for long range air to surface missiles and WS-10 is for heavy weight aircraft like Su-27 clones
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
In terms of TWR, Japan's midget engine is on par with China's, but it is much smaller and you don't just make engines bigger to get the same effect. In that respect, since it has the same TWR, but is much less powerful; it is outclassed. Just like if 2 fighters were equally skilled and fast but one was just much larger and more powerful than the other, he would outclass his smaller foe. Thrust vectoring is not a difficult technology, especially the way that the Japanese did it. They put 3 plates outside of each engine; it's not even a fully moveable engine nozzle like the Russians. Anyone who could make an engine wouldn't have trouble making that if they wanted.
If you think that just because the TWR are similar, a small engine is technologically on par with a larger engine, then you should look into flying aircraft models made of foam. Their engines typically have a TWR of over 10. Here's link to a spiffy lil engine.
Weighs 180g, puts out 2,150g of thrust. TWR of 12, costs $34 plus shipping. Buy it and congrats! By your definition, now you're technologically ahead of the F135 engine! LOL
Yeah, Kaveri is supposed to have a TWR of 7.8 and be a 4th gen engine, but it's not! It's scrapped. Failed/abandoned projects don't have the honor of being compared to operational engines! Just because the dreams you gave up on were almost on par with someone else's reality does not make you almost his peer.
But what makes me think that you are very confused and not at all knowledgeable of engines is that you brought up a missile engine and compared it to a turbofan. WHY??? Why at all? What point were you trying to make? Why didn't you compare it to the specs of a Chinese long range air-to-surface missile?
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b787
Captain
Are you this reckless when you write?
Let eme explain you why China is behind the west in jet engines.
Any generation of jet engines has two basic factors to be defined, onw is TWR and the other is SFC.
Russia has engines like NK-25 of 24000 kg of thrust, but the engine is used on Tu-22M, by thrust WS-10 or even F-119 are much less powerful.
But the NK-25 is heavy and big, it weighs almost 3000 kg, same is R-79-300 used in Yak-141, it has a thrust of 15000, but it weighs 3000 kg.
So they are not fifth generation engines but fourth generation engines.
You assessment did not consider size.
What has been wrong on Kaveri? the answer is the LCA is too fat for it, why J-10 is using the Al-31 operationally?
Answer simple the WS-10 is still in tests and it has been only relatively more successful than Kaveri.
XF-5 is designed for a very light aircraft, yes you are right ATD-X is light and small, it has the same drawbacks J-20 has, J-20 is under powered, it needs to lit its afterburner to reach supersonic speeds so basically it is flying on fourth generation engines.
The Brazilian TJ-200 jet engine for example generates a TWR of close to 11:1
see its aplication on cabure 300 open link
You were laughing as the TJ-200 was not advanced enough just because it weighs 20 lb and generates a thrust of 220 lb, but the engine already has find use on a cruise missile and size matters on aircraft of this size specially if you want small aircraft carry this missile.
The main advantage of this missile, is obviously size but SFC is another, because it does not need lots of fuel, NK-25 is of 24000 kg of thrust but also it gobbles fuel in the same way.
This shows then why you do not understand why Russia is struggling to catch up with the west and China is also behind