On 12 April Frank Whittle became the first person to successfully start and run a turbojet engine. In may the engine took to the air in an experimental.
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- Frank Whittle and the birth of the jet engine
- Destinations
- History of the jet engine
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None of this occurred in isolation.
Frank Whittle and the birth of the jet engine
The story of the jet engine can never be told without mentions of Maxime Guillaume, who secured a French patent for a jet engine with a gas turbine in no prototype was ever produced as it was beyond the scope of existing technology , and of Hans Von Ohain, who beat Whittle to the punch by building the first fully operational jet engine in as Germany chased advantages in the global conflict.
But it was Whittle who first conjured the improbable into whirring, purring operation.
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And if you want to trace his legacy the pressure of his work wreaked havoc on his health, causing a nervous breakdown in , although he lived to 89, his love of cigarettes claiming him in you can do so in more detail than via a glance at the sky. The following six locations all bear compelling witness to his persistence and endeavour. It also has exhibits on more modern facets of travels through the heavens — including the role of carbon fibre in 21 st century aircraft.
It sits in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall with other fundamental fragments of the jump to high altitude — such as Spirit of St Louis, the aircraft with which Charles Lindbergh, foreshadowing Whittle, managed the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic, in May However, this was essentially a stunt. The problem was that rockets are simply too inefficient at low speeds to be useful for general aviation.
The earliest attempts at airbreathing jet engines were hybrid designs in which an external power source first compressed air, which was then mixed with fuel and burned for jet thrust. In one such system, called a thermojet by Secondo Campini but more commonly, motorjet , the air was compressed by a fan driven by a conventional piston engine.
Examples include the Caproni Campini N. None was entirely successful and the CC. Engineers in the s realized that the maximum performance of piston engines was limited, [2] as propulsive efficiency declined as blade tips approached the speed of sound. For engine performance to increase beyond this barrier, a way would have to be found to radically improve the design of the piston engine, or a wholly new type of powerplant would have to be developed.
Gas turbine engines, commonly called "jet" engines, could do that.
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The key to a practical jet engine was the gas turbine, used to extract energy from the engine itself to drive the compressor. The gas turbine was not an idea developed in the s: Limitations in design and practical engineering and metallurgy prevented such engines reaching manufacture. The main problems were safety, reliability, weight and, especially, sustained operation. This was to make it possible to obtain a long range with low initial muzzle velocities, allowing heavy shells to be fired from relatively lightweight guns.
In he applied for a German patent on aircraft powered by supersonic ramjets, and this was awarded in The first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. In , Edgar Buckingham of the US National Bureau of Standards published a report [7] expressing scepticism that jet engines would be economically competitive with prop driven aircraft at the low altitudes and airspeeds of the period: Instead, by the s, the piston engine in its many different forms rotary and static radial, air-cooled and liquid-cooled inline was the only type of powerplant available to aircraft designers.
This was acceptable as long as only low-performance aircraft were required, and indeed all that were available. In October , he developed his ideas further.
Practical axial compressors were made possible by ideas from A. Whittle would later concentrate on the simpler centrifugal compressor only, for a variety of practical reasons. Whittle had his first engine running in April It was liquid-fuelled, and included a self-contained fuel pump.
Destinations
Whittle's team experienced near-panic when the engine would not stop, accelerating even after the fuel was switched off. It turned out that fuel had leaked into the engine and accumulated in pools. So the engine would not stop until all the leaked fuel had burned off. Whittle was unable to interest the government in his invention, and development continued at a slow pace.
In , Hans von Ohain started work on a similar design in Germany , and it is often claimed that he was unaware of Whittle's work. However, the Whittle patent was in German libraries, and Whittle's son had suspicions that Ohain had read or heard of it. Years later, it was admitted by von Ohain in his biography [13] that this was so.
Von Ohain himself is quoted as saying " We felt that it looked like a patent of an idea" "We thought that it was not seriously being worked on. His first device was strictly experimental and could only run under external power but he was able to demonstrate the basic concept. Ohain was then introduced to Ernst Heinkel , one of the larger aircraft industrialists of the day, who immediately saw the promise of the design.
History of the jet engine
Heinkel was obsessed with fast aircraft, and the jet might afford him both an entry into the aero engine industry and put his firm well ahead of its competitors in performance. The race was on to develop the first practical turbojet aero engine, though the odds were stacked. One contestant was operating on a shoestring in a decrepit foundry, without either government or industrial backing, in whatever time he could spare from his air force commitments. The other had the resources of a giant industrial concern, with its engineers and scientists, and could devote full time to the project. And while Whittle had no inkling of what was going on in Germany, Heinkel would soon be monitoring his progress.
Pye, deputy director of scientific research: One of the early combustion test rigs, using a barrel of "white spirit at the BTH facility at Ladywood. There was just sufficient cash for apprentices at British Thomson-Houston BTH , a large engineering firm in Rugby, to assemble a prototype engine. It was revolutionary, unlike anything previously seen. Whittle calculated that each minute the inch compressor would deliver 13, cubic feet of air to the combustion chamber while burning four gallons of fuel, with the power turbine supplying more than 3, hp to the compressor.
Stanley Hooker, the genius largely responsible for doubling the power of the Rolls-Royce Merlin piston engine, wrote: On April 12, , the engine was started.
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It was notable both historically and for what happened next. For a second or two the speed increased slowly. Then, with a rising shriek like an air-raid siren, the speed began to rise rapidly and large patches of red heat became visible on the combustion chamber casing. The engine was obviously out of control. I screwed down the control valve immediately, but this had no effect and speed continued to rise.
Fortunately the acceleration stopped at about 8, rpm, and slowly the revs dropped again. The same thing happened on the second run. Fuel was pooling in the combustion chamber when the fuel pump was tested prior to start-up, and continued to power the turbine even with the fuel supply turned off. A simple drain cock solved the problem. The jet age had begun.
In September von Ohain had the satisfaction of seeing his first turbojet run, unaware that Whittle had beaten him by five months. Luckily for the future of British jet engines, the Air Ministry placed Whittle on the Special Duty List, allowing him to work on the engine full time.
By April , the modified engine was ready. Ironically, the previously uninterested government now put the project under the Official Secrets Act. The September Munich crisis added urgency, but funding was again drying up and tests on new designs at Power Jets resulted in a series of breakdowns. We did several runs up to this speed. Pye who had been so dismissive three years earlier asked Whittle if he was willing to proceed, at the risk of damaging his RAF career. The Air Ministry would buy the experimental engine but leave it with Power Jets for further development, and arrange for an airplane to be built for it.
One week later the panzers crashed into Poland, igniting a second world conflagration. The race now developed into which country could produce the first combat jet aircraft.