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Why jet engines aren't made in China
211–220 of 342 posts
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#212> 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 so it seems unlikely someone with superior planes is going to be able to go in and bomb them into submission . You seem to believe that China's military ambitions are purely defensive, but that is not the case. They have grandiose expansionist ambitions which include basically the entire South China Sea - which in spite of its name is shared by many countries. Not to mention their e…
Given a generous enough definition of "defensive", maybe
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#213This 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 bet…
At the start of WW2, the UK was struggling to make enough planes the hand-crafted, coach built way. A deal was done for US automotive concerns, notably Ford, to make British planes under license, en-masse.
Note that this was to be done without Weingarten and other German presses, which were the EUV machines of the era. This was also to be done without the 'Black Country', which was the British industrial heartland centred around Birmingham.
A big problem turned out to be the British blueprints, which were ill-suited to precision mass manufacturing, where fettling is not allowed. Everything had to be redesigned for mass manufacturing.
This redesign for mass manufacturing was evidently outside of the competencies of the Brits but an easy task for the guys at Ford.
Until 2014, China and Russia have genuinely sought trade and cooperation with the West. The deal was hydrocarbons and labour in exchange for luxury goodies, specialist machine tools, avionics and much else, including jet engines. It was win-win, mostly.
However, in 2022 the gloves truly came off. Economic cooperation between Russia and China became necessary. Thus far, there is no evidence of Chinese war material on the front line, other than dual use items seen on both sides such as the ubiquitous DJI Mavic drones. However, there is a deeper partnership going on between the two nations, with aerospace being extremely important.
Already Rolls Royce are making gas turbines in China, for non-plane things. Naturally they hold back the true trade secrets, and the US government absolutely makes sure that is the case. However, you know it is only a matter of time before there are several Shenzhens for aerospace growing like mushrooms in China, blueprints from Russia, re-engineered for mass production.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#214> The USSR, now Russia, entered in the 1950s, when the technology was still new and the Western advantage was much smaller, and they still, over their entire history, did not produce a civil or military engine that had parity with West. Interesting reading. Sadly, once I encountered this, I realized the article was extremely biased. The USSR successfully achieved this several times. I suspect this article will age ba…
Do you mean WS-19? It gives 2023 as the production date for WS-15, which is in the past.
By going live, I meant when WS-15 is integrated with J-20 rolled-out in a fully-operational and mature manner. This is expected to substantially close the gap with top U.S. fighters in raw propulsion performance.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#215The 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 Airbu…
Modern high bypass jet engines are already pretty close to maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency, given realistic constraints such as weight, wing clearance, noise, and so on.
Even if all constraints were relaxed, the absolute limit might be another halving of fuel consumption. (with trillions of R&D)
And beyond that, there literally can never be jet engines significantly more efficient, until the end of the universe.
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
You fell for a meme that was tired years ago already (your link is from 2017, after all). The article itself notes, “Relatively low-value items, like ballpoint pens, have not been a priority”, so obviously this says little about higher-priority military and industrial areas to which the CCP devotes greater effort.
is it really a tired meme? its a clear prioritzation choice from the government, and that prioritization is itself a technology notably this same prioritization mode resulted in the soviet union failing to produce quality of life improvements for its citizens. the failure is that the CCP is unable to prioritize making simple useful stuff
What country do you live in, and are they currently capable of making ballpoints?
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Airbu…
The A380 was killed for lack of demand as the airline industry changed. Boeing made the right bet. In addition even if had been engine-centric there is no way there was enough market to dedicate R&D for a new engine for this limited market.
Yes and no. Had there been more demand it would still be around, of course. But one of the reasons (albeit a lesser reason) there wasn't much demand was because of the antiquated engine tech. The poor A380 fuel efficiency competitiveness had less to do with it having 4 engines than that those engines were 1990s tech, same generation as on the 777, despite the first delivery of the A380 being more than 10 years after the 777. The 787 and A350 were favored by the industry not only because of point-to-point, but because their engines had far better fuel efficiency. (Even at the same generation, ETOPS aircraft would have slightly better fuel efficiency, but maintenance and overall operational cost is significantly higher because of the power envelop and reliability margins required, keeping the quadjet A380 cost competitive.)
Both Airbus and Emirates were willing to keep the A380 alive. Emirates was making money on it, and Airbus believed the market would eventually turn as airports reached takeoff/landing capacity. But Emirates wanted upgraded engines, so for several years there were negotiations between Emirates & Airbus on the one hand, and the big 3 engine makers on the other. IIRC, circa 2018 Emirates & Airbus were very close to a binding agreement with Rolls-Royce for an upgraded engine, but then Rolls-Royce faced costly issues with its existing programs. At the same time, prospective investment in the engine industry had already started winding down, and Rolls-Royce didn't want to be spending cash on a new program while GE and Pratt & Whitney were passing through profits to shareholders. So in 2019 Rolls-Royce walked away, and shortly thereafter (weeks if not days), Airbus and Emirates agreed to terminate the A380.
It's difficult to find non-paywalled sources, but see, e.g., https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2018/10/16/is-...
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#218The 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 The market may not for the most capital-intensive businesses, but US laws at least attempt to address the situation. In Boeing's case, for example, the McDonnell-Douglas merger likely could have been blocked under existing anticompetitive laws. The US's longstanding refusal to apply antiticompetition law causes a number of harms to consumers…
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Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are about as many gender study majors in the U.S. per year as there are aviation engineering majors. That is one small niche of engineering majors that includes all of gender study.
That's actually pretty bad. The rest of the world is very willing to spend money on American aerospace products and services. Is it willing to buy gender theory from you for similar amounts of money? If not, the production of specialized majors should not be 1:1.
Do you think its zero sum? We could just put all the gender studies students into engineering and expect them to thrive there?
Re: Why jet engines aren't made in China
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
They get perfect enough single crystal superalloy blades every time ... after throwing out the half that fail. The science is well understood, even if it's fiendishly hard [0]
0 - https://www.asme.org/wwwasmeorg/media/resourcefiles/aboutasm...