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Why jet engines aren't made in China

aakash.substack.com

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Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#141

Post by IndeanCondor »

Probably the most head in the sand mil-tech article I've read in long time. There are very few explicit claims the author makes about Chinese capability that can be addressed, most of it just gesturing at anecdotes or vibes.

The author does not notice that the F-35 is a single engine jet rated for VSTOL flight characteristics. The F135 is required to produce that much thrust by itself to support that profile. The J-20 is a twin-engine fighter. Why, pray tell, does the engine designed for a twin engine, land based fighter designed for carrying large payloads of air to air munitions need to beat the thrust of the F135? The comparison is worse than stupid.

The Chinese Flanker fleet is being built out and maintained at scale with WS-10s, it's industries churn out 100-120 J-20s per year, all with twin WS-15s. This is a mature jet engine capability, at massive scale. "Not made in China"???

The author makes a passing comment that the WS-15 is "outdated" compared to NATO forces. They are clearly blissfully unaware that the F-18 Super Hornet standard runs the F414 powerplant, as old as the WS-15, itself an upgrade on the F404 powerplant, 50 years old now. The F-18F is the USN's mainline pacific theatre fighter.

I honestly believe anyone who considers the Chinese jet engine program to have been a failure to have perhaps lost some marbles along the way. It demonstrably is not, unless you think the PLAAF is about to collapse midair, a notion their daily ADIZ violations and interceptions over the SCS and the Taiwan straits should thoroughly disabuse. My prediction is by 2037 the entirety of Chinese domestic civil aviation will be running the C919 and they'll be a serious competitive threat to Airbus and Boeing.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#142

Post by leonidasrup »

Jet Engines Aren’t “Made In China” because companies are not allowed to outsource jet engines manufacturing to China. Gas turbine engines and associated equipment are seen as military technology, which is subject export controls by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) of U.S. Department of State.

https://precisionam.com/articles/precision-machining/itar-re...

https://aircraft.zone/navigating-the-rules-a-guide-to-u-s-ex...

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#143

Post by roysting »

Grombobulous wrote: post #10
ivell wrote: post #2

This is a strange article. I did not find anything that is a blocker for China. China is a relative new comer to jet engines and this technology is tightly guarded by incumbents and needs time to mature. If China can master nuclear, space, chips, it seems a bit stretch to say they it is the Jer engines where they fail.

I even thought that the example of automobiles proved the jet engine analogy wrong. Sure, automobiles aren’t as complex as a jet engine, but they’re still complex, especially the internal combustion variants. Something like 10 years ago we were laughing at videos of Chinese cars spectacularly failing crash tests, and now China is selling to very heavily regulated markets. Same deal with things like high speed rail.

I agree. They built the J-20, including the engines with several variants. When you look at the whole landscape, it is clearly deliberate and strategic prioritization and sequencing that was the limiting factor.

It doesn’t even take a lot to understand that. It’s the same tried method they’ve been applying for decades now; information gathering, rapid prototyping cycles, quality threshold goals, led by overcapacity dominance. It’s really not much different than agile and “hyperscaling”, accepting massive losses for a long period because the objective is shifting core dynamics.

Ironically, in the US it was used to crush competition and innovation and parasitize the society while on the global scale, China is increasing competition and/or breaking up the monopoly of the parasitic cabal that controls the West and long the world.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#144

Post by jmyeet »

This is a fascinating read. I have 3 thoughts.

First, the certification process in aviation absolutely is a massive issue. This was in large part the undoing of Bombardier. Well, that and Boeing successfully getting the US government to put 300% tariffs on them. But one of their go-to-market delays was that they simply weren't set up for FAA's processes and that was a mistake.

Second, I think there's a difference between the China of now and the China of the 1970s. It seems like Deng Xiaoping did kind of throw money at problems. I don't think that's true anymore. Or at least it's far more integrated and thoughtful that it might've once been. The example I'm thinking of is EUV. Go back 2-3 years and you'll probably find a lot of people who would say China won't replicate EUV for similar reasons about the supply chain, interdependence and vertical integration. But we're only a few years away from that now. The author is correct to raise an important factor: local demand. This was the mistake (IMHO) of US bans on exporting the best chips to China: it created a captive local market for Huawei chips.

Third, if I was in charge of bootstrapping a jet engine ecosystem (that's really what it is) given all the very real problems the author raised, how would I do it? I'd to bootstrap the materials side and manufacturing in other industries that don't have the stringent testing and regulation requirements of commercial aviation. Gas turbines, medical equipment, orthopedics, that sort of thing.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#145

Post by leonidasrup »

OneDonOne wrote: post #33
dmitrygr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Material sciences needed for modern jet engine blades are a closely guarded secret, and thanks to not manufacturing them in china, those secrets have managed to remain not stolen. Fun story: it is not just jet engines - it is only recently that china was able to actually make indigenous ballpoint pens https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114

It is not the pen, it is the pen tip . Ballpoint pen tips are microscopic tungsten carbide ball held inside ultra-thin steel sockets. So you need cutting tolerances precise to 0.001 millimeters. If the socket is a fraction of a micron too loose, the ink leaks. Too tight, and the pen won't write. Source from al-Arabiya: https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2017/01/14/At-last-Chi... The point (no pun intended) is that…

China's ballpoint pen quality as a reflection of manufacturing quality:

" China's inability to produce a complete, high-quality ballpoint pen came to widespread attention in 2015, when Prime Minister Li Keqiang singled out the products at a seminar in Beijing, noting that his writing was "rough" when he used Chinese-made ballpoint pens. For Li, China's failure to manufacture a complete ballpoint pen was indicative of the Chinese economy's weaknesses. "That's the real situation facing us," Li said at the time. "We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function." "

https://www.smh.com.au/world/finally-china-manufactures-a-ba...

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#146

Post by kergonath »

IHateAcronyms wrote: post #80
akiselev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost. US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC supera…

TFA = The Featured Article/The F**ing Article

The word is "fucking". We’re grown-ups, we can use grown-up words.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#147

Post by leonidasrup »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #39
justincarter wrote: post #27

I 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…

There is an old saying in the engineering world: “Regulations are written in blood.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#148

Post by yanhangyhy »

inglor_cz wrote: post #137
yanhangyhy wrote: post #75

This 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…

China has invested into high-speed rail for the same reason that Japan, France and Spain did: the big cities tend to be in the "sweet spot" distance of 250-750 km from one another, which is very comfortable to ride in a high-speed train. Distances over 1000 km are already favorable for passenger jets. Even in today's Western Europe, there just aren't that many really long distance trains (by which I mean something li…

that's the result, not the reason

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#149

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tzs wrote: post #76

> It may be surprising, then, that in jet engines, China remains at least a full decade behind the West Do they need to be at the same level as the West? For civilian aircraft a decade or two behind seems like it would be good enough. For military aircraft that could be a significant disadvantage, but from what the net is telling me they have excellent air defenses so it seems unlikely someone with superior planes is…

This is the part I don't understand about chip export restrictions; the argument used is that high-end chips would be used for high-tech weaponry, but most weapons don't need high-end chips, 2-5 generations old chips are good enough for most smart weapons. I mean the Tomahawk is from '83, the HIMARS from the late 90's, etc. I don't believe that high end, small process chips are used in any weapons right now.

The only use case is modern day AI workloads, but that's used more in planning than in the field. I can imagine a use case for e.g. image recognition, but again, that tech or the level required is not new at all and doesn't need state of the art chip tech.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#150

Post by agurk »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #82

> 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…

As with all design on aircraft, weight is a key part of the specification. A nacelle that could contain all possible failure modes would be too heavy to fly.

Losing a fan blade, as demonstrated in your two youtube links, is both a more likely event to occur and low enough energy to be able to contain with a reasonable structure.

However consider the situation in [0] where a turbine disk became detached from its shaft. The disk is still taking power from the exhaust gas, but rather using the energy to power the compressor or rotate the fan it is now just increasing its own kinetic energy. This continues until the incredibly strong turbine disk rotates itself apart. From the linked article:

> For engineering purposes, disk fragments are assumed to have infinite energy at the moment of release; they will cut through any reasonable material and cannot be contained

You can see from photographs of the aftermath, the nacelle is missing where this happened

[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

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