I bet the airlines wish they continued to develop this engine now!

O

Ockie

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propfan

35% Better fuel efficiency than conventional turbofans. EasyJet said they want the EcoJet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoJet

but development seems to have gone very quiet as you never hear anything about it.

With the oil price going as it is going...air travel is going to become more and more expensive and many budget airlines will struggle to remain competitive..specially if governments like ours keeps on bailing out the flag carriers thats owned by them.

I think it is a pretty funky looking engine. I hope this gets taken up by Airbus and Boeing...cause if the oil price does not drop substantially...I dont know how the airline business is gonna make it. But not only because of the price of oil....it is just good sense to use a engine that use so much less to do so much more not true?

Nasa_ge_udf.jpg


Anyway....this thread will most likely die a fast death.....wish we had more guys interested in Airliners etc. :cry:
 
ocleroux said:
Anyway....this thread will most likely die a fast death.....wish we had more guys interested in Airliners etc. :cry:
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Hey OP willing to chat airliners and related tech anytime.

Some awesome developments in the last few years with Virgin Atlantic trialing a biofuel jetfuel and SASOL having a world first synthetic avgas from their CTL program.

But agreed fuel economy is going to be pivotal going forward considering it is 40% of most airlines expenses (except for Velvet Sky for whom its free...lol)
:D
 
It does look pretty awesome - props look like submarine props! Interesting that Easyjet reckon it is quieter than conventional jet engines as the other literature makes mention of noise being one of the issues. I suppose the technology has perhaps evolved a bit and jet engines are pretty darn noisy.

Lets hold thumbs for better fuel economy for planes!
 
This is for pussies, bring back the Concorde or something more majestic!
 
etwylite said:
Hey OP willing to chat airliners and related tech anytime.

Some awesome developments in the last few years with Virgin Atlantic trialing a biofuel jetfuel and SASOL having a world first synthetic avgas from their CTL program.

But agreed fuel economy is going to be pivotal going forward considering it is 40% of most airlines expenses (except for Velvet Sky for whom its free...lol)
:D
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haha...that damn funny!

Yeah...I only read about the Sasol syn fuel today ! I cant believe it did not make headline news !
 
ocleroux said:
haha...that damn funny!

Yeah...I only read about the Sasol syn fuel today ! I cant believe it did not make headline news !
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Its been on the cards for a long time already and been in the news a few times that I can remember.

http://www.southafrica.info/business/success/sasol-jetfuel-270910.htm
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/ar...ully-synthetic-fuel-powered-flight-2010-09-21

ponder said:
This is for pussies, bring back the Concorde or something more majestic!
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Ha ha, I would love some commercial Scamjet options:D Nothing like flying at Mach 12 to London making the trip less than an hour...:wtf:
 
etwylite said:
Hey OP willing to chat airliners and related tech anytime.

Some awesome developments in the last few years with Virgin Atlantic trialing a biofuel jetfuel and SASOL having a world first synthetic avgas from their CTL program.

But agreed fuel economy is going to be pivotal going forward considering it is 40% of most airlines expenses (except for Velvet Sky for whom its free...lol)
:D
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Indeed, but we appear to be in the minority here!

Heard about SASOL's synthetic avgas, that would go along way to reducing costs, as would VA's programme.


ponder said:
This is for pussies, bring back the Concorde or something more majestic!
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:D

Indeed, that would be great, or this:

sonic_cruiser_04.jpg


Although quite a bit of the design concept ideas were applied to the 787, also a beautiful aircraft. Then again, I am biased towards Boeing. :D

B
 
Bismuth said:
Although quite a bit of the design concept ideas were applied to the 787, also a beautiful aircraft. Then again, I am biased towards Boeing. :D

B
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Boeing is so behind the times compared to Airbus. The A380 kicks anything hat Boeing has in da panty...and the A350 will also kick the 787 in da panty when it gets released. More passengers...much better distance it can travel. Not the mention Boeing's failure...mmm what is it called again...erm...oh yes....the 747I! SHAME!

hehehehe :p
 
ocleroux said:
Boeing is so behind the times compared to Airbus. The A380 kicks anything hat Boeing has in da panty...and the A350 will also kick the 787 in da panty when it gets released. More passengers...much better distance it can travel. Not the mention Boeing's failure...mmm what is it called again...erm...oh yes....the 747I! SHAME!

hehehehe :p
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Lol, whatever! :D

Like I've said before, the A380 is undoubtedly a technological marvel, it is ugly as sin next to anything esle. I even tried to be objective about it when the aircraft was at FAJS as part of the test flight/round-the-world demo, but still didn't compare aesthetically imho.

Re. the A350, more pax and more range is a plus point, but would like to see a side-by-side comparison between the A350 & 787. Will do this myself, come to think of it.

The propfan appears to be a modified turbofan, with the fan blades outside the engine. The main concern with it, which I see is also mentioned on the wiki page, is noise. Most of the newer turbofans are considerably quieter (best comparison I've seen here is a 737 with regular engines vs. 737s with the Whisperjet mod.). Here Airbus does well, I've found that their engines are quieter overall. Although, comparing an A320 to a 737's noise on landing is a close call, imo (not based on actual tests, but just listening when they are landing, from the outside (not wing, ground, lol)).

But yeah, turboprops are more economic that turbofans, but the downside is that they are slower, noisier and don't quite have the range of the turbofans. Good example here is the US, where regional airlines are tending to adopt turboprops to replace jets on some routes, almost exclusively for this reason. But the US has some strict noise abatement regulations, so all that has to be balanced out.

Re. noise abatement, I find it bizarre that a council complains about aircraft noise from their local airport, which was built long before any houses were anywhere near it. Didn't the ppl think when they bought/built their houses near an airport???. Once saw residents complaining about Waterkloof in the local paper, one of them was an old school-friend, who moved near the airforce base.......

B
 
Bismuth said:
The propfan appears to be a modified turbofan, with the fan blades outside the engine. The main concern with it, which I see is also mentioned on the wiki page, is noise.
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Yip...that is how I understand it..basically a turbofan...but with the fan on the outside. I have tried to understand how exaclty this translates into it being more fuel efficient...but could not find anything that I as a layman could grasp. There was only one vid on youtube also...a golden oldie where Mc Donalds Douglas tested the engine on one of their airframes....but there were no techinical explanations either.

I cant honestly say that I am that bothered really by a airplane rumbling over my house and I live in Bruma and loads of planes fly over there to come in for landing and taking off. You know what...if dealing with a little bit more of noise means we can have affordable airfares and also contribute less to CO2 emissions...then I say go for the propfan baby.
 
ocleroux said:
Oh and PS:.....thought it better not to continue with the Airbus vs (kicks Boeings ass good and proper) debate. It could get ugly!

:p
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Lol, whatever, but I don't mind really, I think I am mature enough to handle taking Airbus down! :D

But yeah, there are others that will report you simply for not agreeing with them.

I don't mind the noise either, but it's something I've worked with previously and am used to, so yeah. When they had the first AAD at Waterkloof, had aircraft of all descriptions flying over our house and rattling windows for a week before the time.

B
 
ocleroux said:
Yip...that is how I understand it..basically a turbofan...but with the fan on the outside. I have tried to understand how exaclty this translates into it being more fuel efficient...but could not find anything that I as a layman could grasp. There was only one vid on youtube also...a golden oldie where Mc Donalds Douglas tested the engine on one of their airframes....but there were no techinical explanations either.
Click to expand...

One of the problems with props is the speed. Prop-driven aircraft tend to be a lot slower, simply because you can't drive the props as fast (you hit tip-speed problems, for example). So it's a tradeoff between efficiency and performance; I'm not sure passengers would be happy with an 18-hour flight to London, for example.
 
Claymore said:
One of the problems with props is the speed. Prop-driven aircraft tend to be a lot slower, simply because you can't drive the props as fast (you hit tip-speed problems, for example). So it's a tradeoff between efficiency and performance; I'm not sure passengers would be happy with an 18-hour flight to London, for example.
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As it is, the tips are often moving faster than the speed of sound (discussed this firsthand with an AME that specialised in props), never mind the audio evidence, so would be difficult to get them move much faster for long/longer periods.

B
 
Bismuth said:
As it is, the tips are often moving faster than the speed of sound (discussed this firsthand with an AME that specialised in props), never mind the audio evidence, so would be difficult to get them move much faster for long/longer periods.

B
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mmmmm ok...but a propfan is a basically still a jet engine...but with the fan which is normally housed inside the the nacelle thingy majiggy now on the outside. So if it is still a jet engine....is it really that much slower? I did not read anything about max speeds on wikipedia when I was reading up on it. Maybe I missed it.
 
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Tacet said:
http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/prop-fan.html?c=y&page=2

Not quite a jet engine. :)

More tech info, in fairly basic terms:

http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/Propulsion1.htm

The way I understand it the characteristics should be very similar to the normal turbofan, with the main difference of noise. The longer your blades are, the higher the velocity of the blade tip, the more noise you get.
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Cool....thank you. My google-fu tends to suck. I will give this a read once I am not so foggy and can actually do 1 + 1 without having to think about it. :-)
 
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