Future Aircraft Technology - Travis Harper's life has always been full of apartments. Growing up two blocks from Midway Airport on Chicago's South Side, it always looked like a plane had landed on his family's house. “I was fascinated by aviation as a child,” he says. "I would watch planes take off and land and imagine that I had the opportunity to travel and experience the world."
It was that charisma that helped set the course of Harper's career. He earned engineering degrees from Northwestern University and Ohio State and joined the GE Aviation team that designed and built the world's most advanced commercial jet engines. His passion for flying took him to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he helped Emirates Airline maintain its GE-powered planes, and to Seattle where he supported Boeing's efforts to bring the manufacturer's 777X powered by the GE9X engine. Service. Service.
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And now it's led him to the latest chapter of his career — playing a key role in a team that's reinventing the future of aviation. He and his colleagues are developing technology that will eventually lead to an engine that uses 20% less fuel and produces 20% less CO.
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Harper is GE's product manager for the CFM RISE program, which was announced Monday by CFM parent GE and Safran Aircraft Engines. The vision of the RISE project is perfectly captured in its name: revolutionary innovation for sustainable machinery. "This technology development project demonstrates the commitment GE and Safran share to achieving ambitious goals for a more sustainable future," says Harper.
CFM was established almost 50 years ago and the partners agreed to extend the joint venture till 2050. The company has delivered more than 35,000 machines to more than 600 operators worldwide. The fleet has logged more than a billion flight hours, the equivalent of 20 trips to Pluto. "It's the most successful transatlantic partnership in the world, at least in aviation," Harper says.
Harper and his colleagues face an enormous task. Since the first CFM engines entered service in the early 1980s, the company has reduced fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
40% less emissions compared to the engines it replaces. Harper and a team of some of the world's top aerospace engineers plan to reduce those numbers by another 20%, which would represent the largest decarbonization gains ever made.
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Their ambitious vision hinged on major advances in engine architecture and technology. But the team is up to it. "I spend a lot of time with Safran, the aircraft manufacturers and the airlines," says Harper. "We are working together to define our vision, determine our future product needs, and implement our efforts to develop an engine that best supports the future of flight as we envision it. We believe that the open fan concept, which offers the highest fuel and CO burn, will bring the most benefit and a proven program for years to come.
"The area we believe will bring the most benefit in the coming years is the open fan concept, which will provide the most significant improvement in fuel burn and CO2 emissions," says Harper. Image credit: CFM International.
The fan at the front of this architecture is "open" because, unlike other turbofan engines, it is not surrounded by a shroud. This open fan helps deliver a significant improvement in drive efficiency, which is a major contributor to reducing emissions and fuel consumption. "Our most sustainable solutions — the ones that deliver the greatest benefit — require an open-fan architecture, which is a matter of physics," says Harper. "While we are exploring other possible configurations, we cannot deliver the same level of fuel burn and CO.
The fan is also a very notable feature. The team plans to build it by injecting resin with special carbon fibers woven in three dimensions. The lightweight and strong material allows engineers to go larger and build rotors up to 13 feet in diameter, increasing propulsion efficiency and bypass ratio.
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Remember this expression. Bypass ratio is a very important number that describes the ratio between the thrust generated by the rotor (fan) and the amount of energy required to drive the rotor. CFM engines evolved from the initial 5:1 bypass ratio in the 1980s to the LEAP engine with an 11:1 bypass ratio. An open fan can achieve a rotation ratio of over 70:1. "We're accelerating the air around the engine by a small amount, but it's a very large volume of air, so we get a big benefit," says Harper.
In an interesting way, the new generation open fan will stand on the shoulders of another open rotor, which was developed with NASA in the 1980s with the support of Safran. This experimental machine, known as the GE36, had composite propeller blades and powered an aircraft that flew at the 1988 Farnborough Airshow.
The GE36 achieved significant fuel savings, but fuel prices fell sharply after the oil shocks of the previous decade. Nevertheless, the technologies introduced by the engine helped chart the course of aviation for decades. Its carbon-fiber blades made GE Aviation's high-bypass jet engines, which helped planemakers build efficient long-haul jets like the Boeing 777 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which could use only two engines instead of four. Since 1995, the GE90 engine for the Boeing 777 was the world's most powerful jet engine until it was replaced by the GE9X last year. "People knew in the 1980s that the open rotor was a powerful idea, but then we weren't as advanced in our ability to improve aerodynamics and acoustics. You have to realize that the team working on that engine at the time probably had a mainframe in the entire building.
Both GE and Safran "have made incredible progress with analytical and computational tools based on test results from wind tunnels to full engine tests," says Harper. In fact, in 2018, Safran tested its open rotor design.
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But making a bigger fan isn't the only way to make an engine more efficient. Another approach involves improving the engine core that houses the compressor, combustion chamber, turbine and other components that convert fuel energy into efficient rotating motion.
The RISE team does this by using another revolutionary material already proven in the LEAP and GE9X engines. This material—ceramic matrix composites, or CMC—is about one-third the weight of steel, but can withstand temperatures up to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, exceeding the melting point of many advanced metal superalloys. This temperature increase improves the thermal efficiency of the engine. "It took us 30 years to develop the technology at GE Research, GE's corporate labs, and we implemented it in the LEAP engine," says Ted Engling, a retired GE aviation engineer who led the GE9X development and was Harper's project manager. "The LEAP engine is the fastest-selling engine in CFM history, with approximately 4,500 delivered over the past five years. Because of this program, we now know how to mass-produce component parts and design new parts to take advantage of its characteristics." The planned demonstration engine will include 3D-printed components, hybrid power systems, advanced heat transfer circuits and other breakthrough technologies.
But the RISE team also ensures that aircraft manufacturers and operators can take full advantage of advanced technology. "We have the opportunity to work with aircraft manufacturers to improve engine placement and performance in the aircraft to create the best engine for the best aircraft," says Harper. "I spend a lot of time with airlines and lessors, trying to understand their strategies for renewing their fleets, their strategies for making them more sustainable, and how our future products can help solve their needs in the short term and in the future. 2050. The partnership we have with these customers gives them Making sure our projects are aligned with them – to create products that are needed and wanted – is critical.”
For Harper, it seems like ages have passed since the first flight he and his family took from chilly Chicago to sunny Florida. "My whole life I've been learning how the aerospace industry works and how the different parts come together," he says. "I've always wanted to learn as quickly as possible and surround myself with people I can learn a lot from. As a kid watching airplanes take off and land on the South Side, I never imagined that I would be leading our efforts to develop technologies that would make flying more sustainable and available to future generations. Transportation by 2050 A four-fold increase in greenhouse gas emissions if congestion and fundamental changes do not occur.But how “fundamental” should these changes be and what will they affect?
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