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Why jet engines aren't made in China

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Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#181

Post by rbanffy »

pfdietz wrote: post #153
rbanffy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 manufactu…

Directional solidification is a kind of additive manufacturing? You're carefully adding to macroscopic crystalline structure at a propagating melt/solid interface.

It kind of is, but it happens within the molten part, so it's harder to control (and, considering how hard, I'd say the science behind it is still poorly understood).

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#182

Post by antonkochubey »

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…

>they have excellent air defenses

in which conflicts have those air defenses proven themselves?

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#183

Post by ReptileMan »

torginus wrote: post #131
Grombobulous wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very surprisingly it's never mentioned that car turbos have very similar requirements - spin at 10K+ RPM at 10000K+ for or tens of thousands of hours with little expected maintenance. They are often made of superalloys, yet regular cars, down to econoboxes costing 20-30k or less have them, and are made by the millions.

If you figure a way for airplane to stop on a cloud in mid flight to wait for a tow vehicle I have a Nobel award for you in whatever field you want.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#184

Post by bluegatty »

roenxi wrote: post #138
shalmanese wrote: post #74

The 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.…

> The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times but governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance. Sounds like the free market hasn't been tried, a key plank of the free market on the supply side is that incompetent managers have to go bank…

The free market works fine - the problem is at that scale, we can only afford a few key players, they're strategic so they end up having subsidies other considerations.

Put differently: if the population of the earth were 50 Billion people instead of 8 Billion - then we'd have markets with enough competition to allow free market dynamics.

In that context, then we'd have 'Space companies' being subsidized.

We'd have a hotel on the Moon and we'd easily be on Mars already.

Those aircraft are on the 'edge of our resource capabilities' - huge companies at the top of the pyramid.

If we had a massively bigger economic pyramid, they would be more like car companies.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#185

Post by otherme123 »

khurs wrote: post #107

This 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?

Alegedlly they tried, but Airbus didn't fall for it. Search for "Ghost plane Airbus A320 C919" if you want to expand. It is a case of "we have no proof, but we have no doubt": China buys a bunch of A320, one of them disappears and never flies. After some time, a A320 clone C919 appears on their market.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#187

Post by khurs »

otherme123 wrote: post #185
khurs wrote: post #107

This 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?

Alegedlly they tried, but Airbus didn't fall for it. Search for "Ghost plane Airbus A320 C919" if you want to expand. It is a case of "we have no proof, but we have no doubt": China buys a bunch of A320, one of them disappears and never flies. After some time, a A320 clone C919 appears on their market.

Well at least they bought and didn't rent for 6 weeks, dismantle, reassemble and return....

https://qz.com/1146259/mercedes-got-caught-trashing-a-rental...

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#189

Post by wahern »

shalmanese wrote: post #74

The 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.…

> I think a lot of the jet engine manufacturers are seeing this same corporate rot process, the number of high profile scandals across the industry and reports of insiders on how the number crunchers are taking over the business are strangely reminiscent of what we heard out of Boeing and Intel.

And there's the opening for China. The 90s and early 2000s saw alot of innovation by engine manufacturers. Boeing and Airbus built their planes around the next generation of engines coming out. But over the past 10 or so years all the major engine manufacturers decided to stop investing in new civilian engines and maximize their dividends on existing models. That's what killed the A380--the A380 engines are 90's tech, and all the engine manufacturers declined to build a new engine for an upgraded A380, not even one that utilized the current tech, and not even if Airbus backstopped potential losses.

So now is probably the best time since the 1980s for China to play catch-up. But the biggest problem is as you pointed out--engines and airframes are developed together, and both Airbus and Boeing also decided to stop new aircraft development and instead coast and reap dividends for the next decade or two, so there's no market for China to break into. There's still development happening in the defense space, but that's not a market open to China, either. Their only potential market is primarily domestic, and it's not capable of incentivizing and demanding dogged innovation in the same way the international market could.

Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China

#190

Post by elzbardico »

FpUser wrote: post #49
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

>"50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west." Bollocks. Russia does that as well, single crystal turbine blades in particular so the west is not the sole gatekeeper here. Given the circumstances Russia might as well share the tech for some things in return

Russia is a backwards mongol empire. This is the official narrative on HN, don't you dare suggesting otherwise.
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