Yes, that has been the plan right from the beginning of Y-20's development.
Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
- Start date
Yankee and friends have a similar somber attitude about the WS-15 progress. It has reached the same stage as F-119 before integration with F-22 but that happened so long ago. On the bright side at least China is finally in the same generation as the U.S. 20 years ago when the Americans were making F-119 China was making advanced turbojets and sometimes failing...
Another interesting leak is that WS-18 is pretty much mature. It is a domestic copy of D-30 and they went about in a Ship of Theseus approach where they incrementally swapped out Russian components for domestic components until the whole thing was domestic. Then China proceeded with mass producing WS-18 with domestic components.
i think. WS-15 currently stands in between F-119 and F-135. ahead of F-119 but behind F-135 in terms of overall specifications and components.
even reached at 2000's decade US level is unprecedented for Chinese aero engine industry.
The 4 stage compressor core is the much bigger technical leap. But they’re not mutually exclusive technologies.
The F135 is not as ahead of the F119 as people think. It’s far more akin to the change from the F110-129 to the 132 than it is from F100 to the F119. A very large share of the F135’s thrust gain comes from being a higher bypass engine. The rest is just using better materials in the same basic core design. The WS-15 supposedly has an iteration already in the work that should close the remaining gap.
We’ll see what details emerge about the level of technology the WS-15 uses but I think Yankee and friends are being a tad hasty and greedy lol.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
How much farther ahead has the US moved from the Raptor engine? Being 20 years behind something means different things depending on whether the cutting edge technology has improved marginally over the last 20 years (like vehicles to land on the moon) vs if like 5+ generations have been invented and retired (like supercomputers). I'm super happy about this (and really didn't mean to start a fight yesterday though I was very glad to learn from it) and think that this literally makes the J-20 the most impressively-engined heavy stealth fighter in the world but am I missing something? Is there still a very big gap between the WS-15 and America's top designs? And even if there is, it doesn't make me any less happy because this is at least as much about Chinese momentum in engine building as it is about superpowering the J-20.
I have seen a view elsewhere that the main reason why WS-15 has less thrust than F-135 is that the bypass ratio is lower, but this brings WS-15 much better high-altitude and high-speed performance than F-135. Is this credible?
Everything I can tell about the ATEP is that it’s actually not innovating as much in compressor design and they’ve gone the route of making VCE work while running the engine hotter and harder with better materials.