Turbofan:Alternative Designs

Alternative design for turbofans

All recent jet engines have the same basic architecture: a fan at the front, the turbine engine behind it, and their two flows mix at the exhaust, inside the engine for low bypass ratio engines and outside for high bypass ratio engines. Early designs of turbofans were actually created by adding a ducted fan on the aft part of existing turbojet engines. They were not so bad in terms of efficiency compared to front-mounting engines, but the main issue was that the fan was evolving in a quite hot gas flow, which would eventually corrode or fatigue it more than when it blows fresh air as in a front-mounted fan design.

A second fact is that high-efficiency engines, or modern engines, all use axial-type compressor and axial-type turbine. Some early or less power-requiring designs feature a centrifugal-type compressor, and only one engine to our knowledge had a centrifugal turbine, long ago.

From these two facts, we propose a novel design for turbofans, at least while research or people won't have proven it was wrong: an axial-compressor, hybrid-turbine, aft-mounted ducted fan. The hybrid turbine is a mix of axial and centrifugal designs, in which the hot gas flow would be slightly diverted from its course, while extracting some of its energy for shaft rotation work. The aft-fan would intake the mixed flow of the fresh intake and the turbine discharge, providing higher energy to the fan flow. Properly mixing the two flows would allow the fan to be build with metals supporting low temperatures, like 2000- or 7000- series aluminum alloys. Besides, the resulting design will inevitably be a longer engine.

Full transonic engine design in a single spool with 2.1 BPR

We speak here of virtual bypass ratio (BPR) because since flows are mixed before the fan intake, there is no clear separation between flows of the fan and of the engine's core. However, there is still an inlet area for the compressor and one for the fan, and the ratio between the two mass flow rates going into each is what we call the virtual bypass ratio (VBPR). The real bypass ratio (BPR) is thus the ratio between the sum of the fan duct mass flow rate and the core's mass flow rate over the core's mass flow rate (M_fan + M_core) / M_core.

Let's take an example turbofan engine with a 13cm fan and a 9cm core (and compressor) diameter. The VBPR for this engine is around 1.08 if we consider the inlet flow speeds to be identical on both side ((13²-9²)/9²), and the BPR is in fact 2.09 (13²/9²).

A great advantage of our aft-fan engine design is that both the first stage(s) of the compressor and the fan can operate at transonic speeds. A blade or a fan is said having a transonic operation when the flow passing through it is subsonic, but its rotation speed makes the blades' tips move at supersonic velocities, while their root is generally subsonic too. It thus depends on three main factors: the diameter of the fan on which the blade is mounted, the rotation speed of the fan, and the speed of sound, which depends on the temperature of the air flow. A transonic operation allows higher compression ratios to be achieved, with a lower efficiency than subsonic operation as a drawback, around 5% less because of the drag induced by shock waves.

As a result, our design allows both the compressor entry stage and the fan to operate at transonic speeds, while they have the same rotation speed (one spool shaft), at high altitudes. This is possible because of the temperature difference in air passing through both. The compressor will breathe fresh air, which can go down as low as -57°C in altitude. In this case, the sonic speed is 295m/s. On the other hand, the air that the fan blows will be preheated by the turbine exhaust gas. If we fix a 200°C rise of this air flow, the sonic speed can be around 430m/s.

If we take back our example above with the 13cm fan and 9cm compressor with the 200°C heating of the fan inlet flow, we achieve sonic speed with the same rotational speed, more than 60000rpm, for both the compressor first stage and the fan, which is unique for a 2.1 or even a 1.1 BPR turbofan engine.

Having a transonic speed operation allows higher the compression ratios. The reason why we try to have a transonic operation on the compressor, even more than on the fan, is that since we aim a low number of stages for the compressor, it's not able to have a high overall compression ratio (CR). With a transonic-operating first stage, we hope to have at least 2.0 CR for it, instead of the maximum 1.6 CR in subsonic operation, which would greatly improve the overall CR of the compressor. Depending on the temperature rise induced by this first stage, the second stage may be able to operate at transonic or near sonic speeds too, although unlikely. Higher efficiency of the fan will allow higher mass flow rate and thus higher thrust of the engine, which is obviously great too.

Drawings (schematics or 3D CAD models) are coming soon.