JET ENGINE

Jet Engine



Jet Engines

Introduction

A jet engine, down to the present day, pulls in air by using a compressor. It looks like a short length of an ear of corn, but instead of corn kernels, the compressor is studded with numerous small blades. The compressor rotates rapidly, compressing the air. The compressed air flows into a combustor. Here fuel is injected, mixed with this air, and burned. This heats the air to a high temperature. The hot, high-pressure air then passes through a turbine, forcing it to spin rapidly. The turbine draws power from this hot airflow. A long shaft connects the turbine and compressor; the spinning turbine uses its power to turn the compressor (Brooks, 1997, P 15).

Jet Engines

The jet-engine principle was known early in the twentieth century. However, jet engines work well only at speeds of at least several hundred miles per hour. Racing planes were the first to reach such speeds, with a British seaplane setting a record of 407 miles per hour (655 kilometers per hour) in 1931 and an Italian aircraft raising this record to 440 miles per hour (708 kilometers per hour) in 1934. A young German physicist, Hans von Ohain, was in the forefront. He started by working on his own at Gottingen University. He then went to work for Ernst Heinkel, a planebuilder who had a strong interest in advanced engines. Together they crafted the world's first jet plane, the experimental Heinkel He 178, which first flew on August 27, 1939. Building on this work, the German engine designer Anselm Franz developed an engine suitable for use in a jet fighter. This airplane, the Me 262, was built by the firm of Messerschmitt. It was the only jet fighter to fly in combat during World War II. But the Me 262 spent most of its time on the ground because it used too much fuel. It was a sitting duck for Allied attacks (Brooks, 1997, P 15).

In England, Frank Whittle had no knowledge of Ohain's ideas but invented a jet engine completely on his own. The British drew on his work and developed a successful engine for another early jet fighter—the Gloster Meteor. Britain used it for homeland defense but it did not see combat over Germany because it lacked high speed. The British shared Whittle's technology with the United States, enabling the engine-builder General Electric (GE) to build jet engines for America's first jet fighter, the Bell XP-59. The aircraft company Lockheed then used a British engine in the initial version of its Lockheed P-80, America's first operational jet fighter, which entered service soon after the war's end. The British continued to develop new jet engines that used Whittle's designs, with Rolls-Royce initiating work on the Nene engine during 1944. Rolls sold Nenes to the Soviets, and a Soviet-built version of the engine subsequently powered the MiG-15 jet fighter that fought U.S. fighters and bombers during the Korean War (Flack, 2005, P ...