broadsword
Brigadier
Why not go for PDE for manned aircraft instead of multi-stage counter-rotating engines or VCE?
Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
- Start date
It would be unrealistic, and frankly unreasonable, to expect the WS-15 to *exceed* the F135 or F119. Frankly it's already pretty monumental for the WS-15 to be in the same ballpark. At this point even if there is still a gap between the WS-15 and F135 it's not going to be a very big one. The WS-15 we are getting today is likely *way* more advanced than whatever they were planning to introduce back in the late 2000s.
The impression I've gotten following this topic for a decade now is that after the debacle that was the WS-10's initial introduction they went back to the drawing board for the WS-15's development and waited for critical enabling component technologies to mature before being satisfied with the design. The just get something out the door mentality was a necessity when China was backwards and poor and needed to have something just to maintain a bare minimum capability, but they've now figured out it is an absolutely terrible way to chase the technology frontier. Your designs have to come from much more advanced fundamental components and technologies, and the brunt of your energy and resources need to focus on those foundations if you want to chase cutting edge performance.
If you focus your resources on advancing your component technologies and make your design and product development process downstream of that your product development moves very quickly. If one component or another fails you will have a portfolio of other components to try to maintain a fast rate of iteration on your design. Furthermore, components development itself can iterate much faster on their own than if they're contingent on a larger integrated design stack. If you start with a design and then make component technologies downstream of that you will be forced to redo the whole development stack every time a component fails, since you will have to redevelop new components and wait on those to hit those design goals. The latter approach has only one superficial advantage to the former, which is that it is on paper cheaper. But even that advantage bleeds very quickly once you start hitting project delays. The lesson that product design has to come downstream from components and not vice versa has been critical for China's ability to close the technology gap. Rapid advanced product development cannot work without good optionality in your component technologies. This is why we are now seeing new engine developments happening so rapidly. The dam has finally broken loose.
Last edited:
They've barely gotten PDEs to 1 kn of thrust. A lot more work is needed on that technology.
I think one other thing we have to consider is that Chinese engine development really wasn’t that slow. Going from barely able to make competent turbojets to state of the art turbofans in 20 years is… simply astounding. The reason people knock on Chinese engines is because everything else happened so quickly. J-20, j-16/J-10C, Type 052D/Type-055, DF-21/17, etc. all happened within a span of a decade or less, with most of the associated subsystems in place with one glaring exception.
I also have a feeling that people generally have underestimated just how behind China was in terms of aeroengine development compared to other industries/subsystems where they've been able to progress to global competitiveness "faster".
That is to say, 20 years ago they were starting from a bit of a lower base than the other industries/subsystem domains as well.
As my developmental economics professor at Fudan (I didn't go there for my degree, it was a study abroad program) emphasized more than a decade ago China often found in its joint venture experiences that its problems were not in absorbing the knowhows of technology (knowledge capital), but the knowhows of management best practices (organizational capital). The difference maker on a number of technology fields in China has been improving project management and organizational best practices.
China 10 years ago didn’t have the industrial base nor the amount of money or expertise available for a world class turbofan. A lot of the subsystems require breakthroughs in material like ceramics/carbon fiber composites and advanced metallurgy that China didn’t have access to a decade ago. Nowadays things are very very different.
This makes me think that J-20B/S and J-35 would be leaps and bounds better than current J-20 for this very reason.
There are entire systems and subsystem domains that have emerged now (and will emerge in the next few years) that will have the distinction of being designed and developed using the much more competitive technology and industry base/institutions by China of the mid/late 2010s to 2020ish, compared to even the newest systems in service today which would have been designed and developed using technology of the late 2000s to early 2010s at the latest, and we can all observe how far PRC technology has advanced across the board since that time.
Indeed. Western countries are learning from Chinese management nowadays.
The most funny part in the article, is probably how about, it's the western companies, where their leaders and managers can't let go of power and give more power to people lower down.
While in China, they are able to do precisely that.
And well, what is it again that they are always spouting about China in western MSM? Something about control? Power concentrated at the top? No power to ordinary people? Leaders hogging power yada yada?
While I do know it's more directed at the political side, but the idea that there aren't such thoughts and remarks about Chinese businesses would be very wrong (oh yea, also probably lots of it aimed at state owned enterprises).