..Yet.
Why jet engines aren't made in China
111–120 of 342 posts
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#112This may be a stupid question - but can't China just buy some airbus/boeing planes, take the engine apart and then manufacture each part as is?
No. They do this of course, but with jet turbines the materials science and processes aren't deducible from the work product.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#113This may be a stupid question - but can't China just buy some airbus/boeing planes, take the engine apart and then manufacture each part as is?
The manufacturing is really deeply gnarly. Like crazy materials you'd have to reverse engineer the production process for, then reverse engineer how to form the blades so they'll survive insane loads for thousands of hours of operation without failure under extreme temperatures. It's like saying you can make a MacBook chassis because you have a block of aluminum, some hand files, and an Adderall prescription.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#114The OP is trying to summarize a 1.4Bn country failure to achieve jet engine in: if you do these couple tricks; or because of these two things.
If you're a small country, sure, that kind of strategy might make sense. Pick your battles, run the country like a startup (i.e. bet on one or two industries). China's strategy is the opposite of that: just make production costs low across the board (transport, energy, housing, etc.) and let everything else follow. With 1.4 billion people, something somewhere is bound to pop off.
People are reading way too much into the 5-year plans. It basically boils down to "do science across the board, but lean a bit more into these areas."
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Material engineering is the well known blocker for China, same with semiconductors. They basically have to replicate 50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west. China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same t…
“ well kept under lock in key in the west” You’re joking. These have been put on network drives since early 2000s and CCP has hacked and exfil them
Then where are the jet engines?
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#116another reason why China can't build jet engines: the jet engine manufacturers never relocated their manufacturing to China, which therefore prevented the Chinese from getting their hands on their IP.
it's well known that the way China dominated in solar panels was by "transferring" (aka stealing) the IP from US solar panel makers who had foolishly set up shop in China to reduce costs, and ended up going out of business once Chinese companies got the IP and was able to use their resources or gov subsidies to undercut on price.
I'm not saying that this is always been the reason for China's ability to quickly catch up but it is definitely a factor. Anyone who has worked in China (as I did for a number of years) knows that IP is not safe there (it's not just foreign companies who experience this, Chinese companies find their IP copied by other Chinese companies), and the courts provide almost no help to foreign companies (this may have changed as of 2017, when I left China, up until that point no foreign company had won a significant court case against a Chinese company in a Chinese court).
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#117This is also why China has heavily invested in high-speed rail. Even today, many people who are influenced by persistent misinformation and years of criticism toward China continue to question its high-speed rail system, asking why China doesn’t follow the U.S. model of relying on cars and airplanes instead. But China’s limited ability to rapidly scale commercial aviation means it would have to purchase large numbers…
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Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#118The more parsimonious explanation is that commercial jet engine production is downstream of commercial airbody production and China's currently limited by COMAC's scaling woes. All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve. I'd argue the opposite that jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies.…
> All the money and talent in the world can't replicate real users generating real data that you can use to improve Basically, China excellence in EVs and Solar was driven by the market being new. It's hard (almost impossible?) to outrank an incumbent very entrenched in a big market. You need a paradigm shift (ie: iphone vs nokia) to make the change.
> You need a paradigm shift (ie: iphone vs nokia) to make the change.
I imagine the manufacturing breakthrough for high temperature jet turbine blades could be additive manufacturing where you grow the crystalline structure layer by layer instead of casting and carefully nurturing it. Mature markets with few incumbents focus on local maxima and have difficulty to move from one maxima to another, while a new manufacturer can start from a different position and search for other maxima.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#119I work in the aviation industry. This was a good read. The article hinted at the oligopolies that exist in aviation and in practice the industry is incredibly conservative and slow to change (particularly commercial aviation). While new technology is developed all the time, the extreme regulatory oversight combined with so much of the industry relying on long-standing relationships makes it difficult for any new entr…
Honestly this is a good thing. I can endure buggy software but I don’t want to deal with buggy planes. Regulatory pressure is a market force and a useful one too. There’s a huge difference between ship fast and ship right - the latter one requires deep pockets and willingness to commit to ongoing risk. People always say big Pharma and aviation and such are oligopolies, and that’s bad, but they rarely see the capital…
> I can endure buggy software but I don’t want to deal with buggy planes
A plane built for resilience against defective engine components would be very different from the airliners we fly today. I would assume more engines for redundancy, better protection against catastrophic failure, different designs to allow engines to function even if parts flew out, and so on. It’s an interesting design exercise to build from radically different expectations from the fundamental parts.
Alternatively, a far less radical redesign would be turbines running at a much more forgiving regime feeding electric motors.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#120> A failure in these blades would be catastrophic, resulting in the destruction of the engine, likely followed by the plane itself. Aaaaand the author just lost any credibility with me whatsoever. This is someone who knows big words, maybe did some research and ChatGPTing, and doesn't actually know shit about aircraft or their engines. On passenger aircraft because passengers sit directly inline with the path a blade…
Nacelle is designed to contain blades, but a failed blade can break downstream parts and nothing can stop high-pressure turbine disk parts from flying where they want