Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
- Start date
No. Pupu has always maintained that the WS-10B was a 14 ton engine, while the WS-10IPE is 14.5 tons (as the Weibo post suggests). I believe you are talking about Gongke101 ...
https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/chinese-engine-development.t252/page-438#post-473721
https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/chinese-engine-development.t252/page-437#post-473295
Guess you and I were both a bit wrong. Above 13.2 tonnes and below 14 tonnes.
Since he said just slightly below 14 tons, I just rounded up
There's still the WS-10A option, wherein the engine was limited to 110 kN to avoid issues with stalls and flameouts. It's not impossible that a WS-15A could be set up as a reduced power WS-15, with emergency power at 170 kN and standard operating power at 150 kN.
The WS-10A has a thrust of 132 kN ... I don't know where you got your 110 kN statistic from. Improving reliability does not necessarily entail lowering thrust. The lowest thrust option available for the WS-10 class engine, per this , is 12,000 kgf.
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That was a *very* specific solution to the *very* specific problems that emerged from their disorganized, piecemeal, and inexperienced approach to the development of the WS-10. Specifically, producing a downrated version of the engine was their attempt to find a quick fix for the problem of the high pressure compressor being too powerful for the materials they had at hand at the time, on account of the fact that the HPC wasn’t designed from the ground up for military use but was reverse engineered from a large commercial turbofan. It’s very unlikely that they would encounter the same kinds of problems for engines they’ve designed from the ground up at this point in their technological development, which also makes it very unlikely that downrating the engine would present a viable way to meaningfully expedite development and deployment.
As latenlazy confirms, there's talk going on about the CFM-56-cored WS-10A having troubles with reliability at peak outputs. The engine would flame out at various flight conditions, so limiting it to 110 kN fixed the problem, with full power available depending on necessity.
One issue with the WS-15, though, is that if the WS-10C is at thrust of 142 kN, and a downrated WS-15 is closer to 142 kN, there's less advantage to putting a downrated WS-15 in. That also implies that you're partially-locking the engine design, which impedes the WS-15's development.
Downrating thrust was mainly for addressing the high pressure compressor being too powerful, which was what caused fan blades to break constantly, and not flameout issues. The flameout problem was caused by the fan section being designed independently from the core section, which was necessary because adapting a commercial turbofan for military use also meant only the core section of the commercial engine was useful for a military design. Everything else about the WS-10 had to be designed and developed from scratch. Basically the CFM-56 was used as stepping stone to bootstrap development. The flameout problem was probably immediately addressed with iterative redesigns of the fan section (which might help explain why we saw the number of vanes on the engine face change at least once in showroom models) and FADEC.
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