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Jet Propulsion

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This book intends to provide an introduction to jet propulsion at the undergraduate level.

A jet engine is an air-breathing internal combustion engine often used to propel high-speed aircraft. Jet engines, like rocket engines, use the reaction principle in that they accelerate a mass in one direction and, from Newton's third law of motion, experience thrust in the opposite direction. However, jet engines use air to burn fuel while rocket engines use stored oxidizer. Air-breathing provides higher performance in terms of thrust per unit of propellant and allows the highest endurance. Jet engines hold the current aircraft records for non-refueled distance (26,389.3 miles in 76 hours 45 minutes GlobalFlyer).

Frank Whittle received a British patent for the jet engine in 1930 and Hans von Ohain received a German patent in 1935. The first jet aircraft was the Heinkel He178 flown in 1939 with a von Ohain engine producing 4.9kN of thrust.

More History

The main jet engine types are the turbojet (core flow), turbofan (ducted fan powered by core), turboprop (propeller powered by core), ramjet (aerodynamic ram compression only), and pulsejet (unsteady dynamic compression).

More on Jet engine types

Part I: Core Engineering

Cross section of a high bypass two spool turbofan engine

Part II: Component Engineering

Part III: Case studies

Current Research

Problems

Resources

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