This is a rather long post to say nothing.
Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
- Start date
This is a rather long post to say nothing.
Only if you didn’t do any homework or read up on all the different papers being published about new engine materials and design approaches. Also, I hardly call three sentences a long post.
You mean forum fanboy posts?
I would say it would quite the waste to setup a developement team specifically to improve foreign engines depite never actually hearing anything about it in any applications. To improve thrust in a meaningful way you would basically need to replace the entire combustion system and the high and low pressure sections, though the main problem of the 31 series is actually that the engine isn't even the thrust but that the engine is hopeless behind in any other performance criteria compared to western engines - lifetime, fuel consumption, etc..
No. I mean actual academic papers. As in peer reviewed.
I don’t think you understand how R&D works. No one is setting up a dedicated team just to improve an old foreign engine. What’s happening is that during the R&D process component technologies are being iterated on for other designs, but some new materials, components, optimizations, and design improvements created for new products are modularizable and easily substituted into older designs. Depending on the tech and component you can actually get some significant performance gains with very little extra development time. There is such a thing as low hanging fruit for improving old designs in R&D. It’s not something unusual to see in tech development.
That's not how engineering works, sorry.
You don't just replace parts of the most expensive subsystem of your plane.
Depends on whether the subsystems have heavy integration dependencies or not. If you don’t know that then you don’t really understand how engineering works.
Your position is delusional. Claiming China is improving foreign enignes, without setting up a dedicated developement team, without that we have ever seen such "improvements" in other cases, I don't know what to say here.
I mean I'm aware that in a dedicated China board there is a lot of hope and dreams involved regarding Chinese developements but well...
I didn’t say they didn’t set up a development team. I said that development may not have been so difficult or risky to make it an unreasonable thing to do. Try to exercise some reading comprehension.
No one is setting up a dedicated team just to improve an old foreign engine.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
Can you do a comparison? I understand that the lifetime is lower, but so is the cost per engine. As for fuel consumption, I can only find the ones for earlier AL-31 and F-100 derivatives and while the F-100 is about 14% more fuel-efficient in dry thrust, it is actually less fuel-efficient by a small margin in afterburner. The earlier variants were a little worse on fuel but that's hardly considered "hopelessly behind" and planes like the Flankers certainly don't suffer from short-leggedness. If you have numbers for more recent models for a thorough comparison, that would be great.
You're the one who's delusional. I just posted an example of the Chinese improving a foreign engine and you just ignored it. The article is 2011, citing another article published August 2010 (citation 18) on China improving AL-31 from 900 to 1500 hours. Search for 900 and you'll find the relevant section. Here's the link: