World's Largest Commercial Aircraft Engine Fired Up For The First Time (gizmag.com) 142
schwit1 quotes a report from Gizmag: With a front fan spreading a full 11 ft (3.35 m), the GE9X is a world record holder and generates thrust in the order of 100,000 lb. To accommodate the aeronautical behemoth, the Peebles facility was recently upgraded with a larger air intake, extra fuel tanks to feed the giant engine, and high temperature gear to deal with the hotter, more efficient design. GE says that the GE9X is currently undergoing its first Full Engine To Test (FETT). This is the next level of the test series, which began in 2011 at the component level, and marks the first test of the complete system, which comes only six months after the engine design was finalized. GE says that this relatively early testing was to ensure that the test data was available as soon as possible for the certification engines, which are scheduled to be installed in GE Aviation's flying test bed for certification of flight testing in 2018.
Which airliners? (Score:3)
Re:Which airliners? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Which airliners? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia is wrong - the reason the 777X only has GE as a supplier is because GE and Boeing are carrying on their profit sharing investment agreement they started on the 777-300, giving GE a monopoly on the aircraft type in return for GE providing an investment and assuming some risk sharing on the aircraft itself, in addition to GE funding the engine development.
The bits that are unique between different engine options on an aircraft are limited to:
1. the pylon (although the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350XWB have common pylons for the engines, so thats not an issue any more)
2. the design of the actual intake (some engines are designed around a shorter length intake, some are designed around longer length intakes - basically there's an optimal intake length for a given engine, but in actuality the engine intake design is often handed to the engine manufacturer which offers the better deal to the airframe manufacturer, so one engine will often be running at slightly less than optimal efficiency because its using an intake designed for its competitor).
3. the engine control unit and engine management system code
Beyond the above, an engine can be integrated onto another airframe easily enough - if you want to pay for the certification costs that is.
The main thing which ties an engine type to a particular airframe however is the thrust rating - you want enough thrust for the airframe to do its job, but you don't want too much thrust ability in the engine as that costs weight (you need more or larger parts to move more air through the engine) - you can derate an engine, but that means the engine is not operating in its optimal efficiency band, so again you want a tweaked engine which does the job you are asking it to do.
Re:Which airliners? (Score:5, Insightful)
I will just add that a tweaked engine is just that, tweaked - it doesn't take all that much to take an engine intended for a thrust rating of 100K lb and tweak it to fit on an aircraft that needs a thrust rating of 95K lb, its not even the biggest job in hanging that engine off that new airframe.
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Are there other airframes in production or planned that would be a good match for performance but also provide the ground clearance under the wing to hang this engine?
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Yes, the Airbus A350XWB-1000 (first flight later this year) and the currently-being-mused-about Airbus A350XWB-1100 would be ideal candidates for this engine, as would an A380 with a new engine option (again, currently being mused about for the 2020 or so time period - Rolls Royce will have an engine to hang off of a refreshed A380, GE don't want to put an engine on, and are blocking Pratt & Whitney from making an engine for the A380 because of the Engine Alliance partnership the two have signed).
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A380 only needs ~80k lbf; while the engine would physically fit it must be significantly over-dimensioned.
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As it currently stands, the Airbus A380 only needs a maximum of 76K lb of thrust, but Airbus are currently considering an airframe stretch which will increase the thrust requirement - and the engine can always be derated to a lower thrust rating to optimise it for the airframe, while still maintaining near 100% parts compatibility with the version that is hung on the 777X.
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Pretty sure four of these babies would be way too much thrust for any existing airliner. I'm pretty sure it's intended for the hipster gigantic two engine planes like the Boeing 777
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Would you care to explain how the 777 is hipster? Does it enjoy thick rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, american spirits and pbr?
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Would you care to explain how the 777 is hipster? Does it enjoy thick rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, american spirits and pbr?
Because the 777 is like the mainstream number of the beast 666 but with an ironically off by one error.
Re:Which airliners? (Score:4, Funny)
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I thought it was the fax number of the beast. Hell still has faxes.
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Having used fax machines, I would say that it would fit if the devil forced all correspondence through fax only.
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Since 666 isn't the number of the beast but 619 is due it being off by one in the originally written language it is even funnier.
Ancient Hebrew numerical system left much to be desired and has opened up more cans of worms and confusion than Americans complaining about socialistic meteric system.
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How amusing. You know that the Book of Revelation was written in Greek and not in Aramean let alone Hebrew right?
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They name their jetliners 7x7 to commemorate the 707, which was named after the cosine of the wing sweep angle,
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Sorry, but, direct from Boeing Corp's own pages:
http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/february/i_history.html [boeing.com]
"People who lean toward math and engineering are certain that 707 was chosen because it is the sine of the angle of wing sweep on a 707. It's not, since the wing sweep is 35 degrees and not 45. However, more people lean toward superstition and feel that the positive connotation of the number seven was the reason it was selected.
The truth is a bit more mundane. Boeing has assigned sequenti
Re: Which airliners? (Score:2)
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There's no such thing as too much thrust, there is merely insufficient structural integrity.
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Would it be too much for a volkswagen? [telegraph.co.uk]
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It can now reach speeds of at least 140mph and leaves a 50ft trail of flames in its wake.
Somehow, I can't see how 50 ft flames would be street legal as it claimed in that article...
Re:Which airliners? (Score:5, Interesting)
GE won't put this engine on an Airbus aircraft, because they have a profit sharing stake in the Boeing 777 and 777X (literally, they funded some of the 777-300 and 777X development in order to have an engine monopoly on the type and a share of the profits of each one delivered) so they have a vested interest in not competing with themselves.
Its been a sticking point for Airbus for several years - the A380 has an Engine Alliance engine option (which GE is part of), but EA have been extremely lackluster in moving that engine forward, to the point where their prestige customer (Emirates Airline) has defected to Rolls Royce with their latest orders.
GE won't hang an engine off of the Airbus A350XWB either, because Airbus wants the entire series to be covered by any such engine option (originally, the A350XWB-800, -900 and -1000, now just the latter two as the -800 has been dropped) and GE wouldn't agree to that because the -1000 competes with the 777 and 777X.
So the only manufacturer that will use this engine is Boeing.
Finally! (Score:2)
Finally, here's the long-awaited technological breakthrough to fight against climate change and peak oil!
Size Doesn't Matter - Stop overcompensating! (Score:5, Funny)
"Ladies & gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. If you look out the right side of the aircraft, you'll notice flight 195 challenging us to a race. I've turned the fasten your seat belt sign back on because this shit is about to get real."
Just to clarify (Score:2)
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No, its just the largest - the GEnx has a larger fan size than the GE90-115 (128 inches vs 133 inches) but produces less thrust (115,300 lb vs 105,000 lb).
The GE9X has a higher bypass ratio with a lower core thrust, meaning more air is moved for less fuel consumed.
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Sorry, meant "the GE9X has a larger fan size...". Got the GENx on the brain atm.
Some of us work in metric now (Score:2)
so me not being arsed with firing up the calculator, what's that in Newtons?
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thanky :) considering the engines on the ME262A MK.I only generated 8.8kN apiece, that's mightily impressive.
Re: Some of us work in metric now (Score:2)
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The Rolls-Royce Trent has been tested up to 115,000 lbs thrust (and I have to imagine this new GE engine will be tested to at least that, if not more).
All 8 engines on a B52G produce 110,000 lbs thrust. You could convert a B-52 to a single engined aircraft with one of these GE engines impaled on the tail DC-10 style, and it would probably perform better than with the original 8 engines! Well, until the sole engine quit of course...
Re:Some of us work in metric now (Score:4, Interesting)
The B-52s multiple engine configuration is one of its bonus points in actuality - they did a study about hanging four modern engines off the wings rather than eight, and they discovered that they lost so much command authority through asymmetrical thrust in a single-engine loss scenario that they would have to double the size of the rudder...
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Re:Some of us work in metric now (Score:4, Funny)
444822.16N
Which is completely useless. Only the first few Newtons will actually serve a purpose. After those, you've got hundreds of thousands of redundant Newtons hugely overqualified for almost any job. You're there like "I wanna Big Mac and a chocolate McFlurry" and the guy's like "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." and you're not sure he got your order, but it'be awkward to ask, so you just pull out a tenner and slowly push it over the counter.
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I don't think it's possible to find accurate info, but I'm guessing he weighed somewhere in the 150-200 lbf range, so something like 500-667 Newtons?
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The reason they get bigger but not too big... (Score:5, Informative)
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undergoing its first Full Engine To Test (FETT) (Score:1)
Presumably it has already passed its Burner Overthrust Bearing Adjustment (BOBA).
Oh, my God, that group photo. (Score:2)
You could take anybody out of that photo and put it in any (work related) group photo that I've ever been part of, and nobody would find anything amiss. It makes me shudder.
Really big engines! (Score:4, Informative)
Even better view (Score:5, Informative)
Ive never understood... (Score:1)
I've never understood why they haven't used air-breathing engines like this as a first stage of rockets... Strap a dozen of these to a Falcon 9 to get it moving off the launch pad and up to 40-50k feet, then carry on with rocket propulsion from there. From a power:weight ratio, it would seem to me that they're much more efficient within the atmosphere because they don't have to carry their own oxidizer - and I've always heard that a rocket uses a very disproportional amount of fuel to just get off the laun
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Thrust for one, each Merlin 1D engine produces 30% more thrust than one of these. Weight for another, Merlin engines are only about 1,000 lbs, these engines are over 16,000 lbs. Finally they would only provide thrust for a very narrow window, I believe the first stage is only really in atmosphere for about 2 minutes. All in all it adds a lot of complexity, weight & cost for little if any savings. The SABRE engine may help with some of these issues, but I don't think it has the thrust for a verticall
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High Wing (Score:2)
Time to consider high wing passenger jets. Better ground clearance with large diameter engines.
Hard to believe it has been 20+ years.. (Score:2)
Hard to believe the progenitor of this engine - the GE90 - and the airplane that uses it - 777 - are over 20 years old now.
It still boggles my mind that a single GE90 will make a 747 take off, cruise and land. GE has a 747 testbed, and the GE90 looks positively gargantuan next to the once-huge JT9s the 747 was born with. Yes, once upon a time the JT9 was the biggest fan. (note that the GE test bed uses GE CF6 fans, which are roughly analogous to the JT9, size-wise)
Thrust-wise, the GE90 and now this one
Whispered the GE9X into the 777's ear (Score:2)
"I'm your biggest fan"
Would look nice on a quadcopter (Score:2)
Oblig. metric whine (Score:2)
445kN
They almost got the metric translation complete.
Re:Burn those fossil fuels! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Per passenger yes, but if larger planes means ever more passengers flying then its a rather pyrrhic victory.
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For who? More passengers carried means better economics for the airline - smaller planes increase the number of pilots needed to move the same number of people, less cargo, shorter distances.
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Stuff the airlines, I'm more concerned about the enviroment.
Re:Burn those fossil fuels! (Score:4, Insightful)
Stuff the airlines, I'm more concerned about the enviroment.
What's the point in a pristine environment if you can't fly there to enjoy it?
Yes, I'm kidding. Mostly.
Fuck You (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, fuck off and die.
I've always said the environmentalists want us living in caves and scratching for nuts and berries.
You ACTUALLY want to restrict travel by aircraft? That is probably the one thing that could cripple the world's economy in one fell swoop.Next you'll want to ban cargo ships.
Fuck off you cunt.
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Aww, poppet, go have a lie down and calm yourself.
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Oh, incidentaly, if the enviroment goes belly up there won't be any economy to worry about.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Built a straw man?
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Your concern is probably in the wrong place - aviation is only 2% of carbon dioxide emissions. Banning aviation altogether (all things remaining equal) wouldn't make a difference in our current trajectory.
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Re: Burn those fossil fuels! (Score:2)
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Smaller planes have the benefit of reducing expenses for some shitty airlines who are more likely to be hit up the EU's consumer friendly flight delay compensation regulations.
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More passengers per flight means fewer total flights, so less fuel used.
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You say that as if there is a finite number of passengers. However as technology has allowed the cost of flying to come down it has only driven demand for travel up. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will reverse. Heck, even having the airlines think of passengers as cattle doesn't diminish the demand.
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"Heck, even having the airlines think of passengers as cattle doesn't diminish the demand."
So, you have also tried flying with Ryan Air? ;-)
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You say that as if there is a finite number of passengers. However as technology has allowed the cost of flying to come down it has only driven demand for travel up. There is nothing to suggest that this trend will reverse. Heck, even having the airlines think of passengers as cattle doesn't diminish the demand.
That would be because those "cattle flights" reduce airfare cost, and it is airfare cost, along with rising world-wide wealth (more people with money to fly), that drive air-travel demand. Why should we want to reverse these trends?
Improved technology does help drive down airfare costs, largely by increasing fuel efficiency, but operational changes have been the major driver in reducing airfare costs since the 1970s ("cattle flights", but also simply leaner and more efficient airline operations with better
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I never argued that we should keep less efficient planes. My point was that as more efficient planes, and operations as you pointed out, then the cost of flying goes down which opens the market to more people and we end up with more fossil fuels being used overall.
We should be making all forms of transportation more efficient and looking at getting them off of fossil fuels. However there is a side effect that by making them more efficient that they might get used more overtaking the efficiency gains. It's b
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Are you suggesting there are an infinite number of people on Earth?
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This engine is actually lower thrust than the previous generation, hence "greener." Likewise, the plane's passenger capacity isn't meaningfully higher than the previous generation...
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Per passenger yes, but if larger planes means ever more passengers flying then its a rather pyrrhic victory.
The aircraft that will be using these engines is the Boeing 777X. The 777X is a big airplane (maximum takeoff weight 351.5 tonnes), but smaller than the largest airplanes currently flying like the largest variant of the 747 (the 747-8, MTOW 448 tonnes), or the Airbus A380 (MTOW 590 tonnes). It is about the same size as the smaller 747 variants currently flying (MTOW 333-378 tonnes, depending on model).
The difference is that all of these other aircraft have four engines, the 777X will only have two. Result:
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Spare us your silly exaggerations. Got any half decent arguments or is shrieking like a silly teenager about it?
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Bigger engines mean a few percent more efficiency, so you can increase double the amount of miles flown without feeling guilty.
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Yeah, right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Hypermobility is where its at. Didn't you know its virtually a human right now for people to fly where they want, when they want at a moments notice? More aircraft, more flights, more pollution, just so long as people can go on that w/e break a thousand miles away its all worth it, screw the enviroment.
[The above is sarcasm btw for the hard of understanding]
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so how do you charge the batteries?
Off the grid, maybe?
Which uses coal, oil, and gas?
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Won't happen for a long time because you could never charge the batteries of an airliner fast enough even assuming that you could work out the issue with the weight of the batteries. A quick charge for your car is 20 or 30 minutes. Now imagine how long it would take a plane to charge even allowing for higher currents. The airlines don't want their planes on the ground because they don't make money when the planes are there.
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Won't happen for a long time because you could never charge the batteries of an airliner fast enough
You can replace the spent batteries for charged ones.
Remember that option every time you think about charging times.
Re:hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Not while you are flying you cannot - used batteries still carry a massive weight penalty, while used fuel does not. Aircraft efficiencies are built around getting ever lighter during their cruise, as many aircraft cannot climb to their optimum cruise altitude when at maximum takeoff weight, and only reach optimum after some time in the air - you cant do that with batteries, because the aircraft never gets lighter.
So you will be carrying more weight for greater distances. That problem right there changes the entire airline industries view on battery powered aircraft, because it completely changes the way air travel needs to be handled.
Re:hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
This is dead-on.
I've had to explain this a few times to people that don't understand how it is cheaper and uses less fuel to go out of your way to stop in Alaska to refuel even when your airplane has the ability to fly from China to Tennessee without stopping.
It seems counter-intuitive that 2 flights with more miles is more fuel efficient until you realize how heavy a fully fueled jumbo cargo jet is, and how much fuel you burn just to carry fuel.
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There are obvious limits though beyond the environmental feasibility of intermediate stops even if you redesigned the aircraft for shorter ranges. Cost (crew/maintenance/landing fees), intermediate airport noise/location/capacity, flight crew hour limits.
Being that some routes (South America to Africa or Asia) largely lack feasible airports - you would either have to design two variants, a long range and a short range, to maintain those flights OR you could do more airport hopping with other flights. But on
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The point I was making is that not too long ago, DHL, FedEx, and UPS all did direct flights from China to the Midwest USA.
One of them (I think it was UPS) discovered the Alaska stop saved them money, and within a short amount of time, all 3 were doing it.
I don't think they'd be doing it if it cost more money. Sounds like even with all of the extra costs, the amount of fuel saved still makes up for it.
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You didn't say they were cargo hauls. Very different considerations! I would expect them to do much better as you don't have to haul flight attendants (additional costs that pare down the savings pretty significantly). I would imagine you also make better money per pound with cargo than passengers.
I did a lot of environmental research into the transportation side of things for range and speed reductions for aircraft. Never looked at cargo because of scope.
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Question: aside from the obviously massively added complexity, could you even have an electric engine if you could just jettison the battery packs after take off?
e.g., have some sort of external unit to the plane that simply falls off and flies itself to the ground (like a battery pack drone).
Without knowing anything about it I imagine a significant chunk of power is required to take off and climb, but no idea how much would be required to stay in flight. So if you could periodically get rid of used packs i
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A quick charge for your car is 20 or 30 minutes. Now imagine how long it would take a plane to charge even allowing for higher currents.
20 to 30 minutes.
Batteries can charge in parallel. You may need bigger cables, and more of them, but there's no reason why you can't charge them in the same amount of time.
The only problem for electric planes is the weight of the batteries. It will take a few enormous breakthroughs in battery technology before they're light enough to power an airliner with.
Re: hmm... (Score:2)
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Re: hmm... (Score:2)
You can make carbon neutral jet fuel, you make natural gas in a bioreactor and turn it into synthetic kerosene or you use algae to make it directly. Given the realities of air travel that's a lot more likely to be the path forward than efans, though those are being explored as well (though to be competitive they'd need a leap in battery tech that would already make the entire ground transportation sector move to batteries)
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Nope. Not going to happen for a long time for weight and recharge time reasons stated.
However, hybrid systems can be a thing. A couple of jet fuel powered engines with lots of excess generator capacity feeding electric ducted fans placed optimally on the aircraft. The aircraft is no longer constrained by the necessity of having large diameter fans to get a certain fan area.
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