WP-14 ring a bell? That was intended for China’s best domestic fighter in the late 90s. And if my memory serves me correctly it ended up failing.
Chinese Engine Development
- Thread starter jackbh
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WP-14 ring a bell? That was intended for China’s best domestic fighter in the late 90s. And if my memory serves me correctly it ended up failing.
I remember when everyone said the latest improvements in the WS-10 still represented a 20 year gap with the US. The US hasn't put any new frontier pushing engines into production yet but now that the WS-15 is confirmed to be in small batch production somehow the gap is still 20 years
I remember when everyone said the latest improvements in the WS-10 still represented a 20 year gap with the US. The US hasn't put any new frontier pushing engines into production yet but now that the WS-15 is confirmed to be in small batch production somehow the gap is still 20 years
WS-15 is not used on serial birds yet. Once that happens it will be 10 year gap till F-135 gets revamped or combined cycle engine is out.
broadsword
Brigadier
How far behind is China behind on next-generation engine technology like counter-rotating or VCE in terms of the number of years?
The US doesn’t seem to be moving to counter-rotating high pressure compressors in its immediate tech tree from what I can tell. As far as I can tell China started working on this technology from the early 2000s. The US actually had a variable cycle engine in the early 90s. One of the candidate engines for the F-22, the F120, was variable cycle. The Pentagon chose not to go this direction back then because of program risk. But the US’s next generation engine is going to be VCE. China started development on VCEs from what we can tell around the 2010s.
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Hot section blade material seems to be where most funding went. For R&D, you can see Chinese institutions reporting breakthroughs in CMC blades in 2004. Mass production for at least 4 years. That being said, the video we saw on twitter talked about wrought superalloy production process being very mature. The speaker might be limited to that area only since it is his job.
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Personally i hope the new US fighter jets of the 2030's break records in how poorly managed they are.I don't want to shit on the US MIC. However, from the outside looking in, they seem have lost the "pizzazz". Was it a generational thing because old guys retired, or was just a cultural shift starting from schools. From the F-35 projects, even though they are quite successful, you see they paid more attention to the form than the substance. And, the top-down political pressure was huge in forming such projects. How are they going to fight over some projects span longer than one's career, so that no one can take credit for?
Let's just hope the new fighter jets of the 2030s (both AF and Navy) can regain some vigor. While I am strictly anti-war, I'd like to see some nice war machines though
The CJ-1000 has moved to carbon fiber fan blades and uses 3D printed combustor parts. *If* some rumors from the mid 2010s about the WS-15 prototype having some fan vibration problems are true, then the WS-15 might as well (since that was supposed to be the solution they came up with to deal with the problem),
Carbon fiber should only be used in cold sections, right? They can't stand much high temperatures
Yes. For the hot section future materials will involve CMCs, single crystal alloys with higher rhenium content, and potentially high entropy alloys. An article from last year said they finished small scale testing of a 3D printed CMC blisk that's meant to be used in high pressure compressors.