The development of turbojets has been a major challenge from the outset, both military and civilian the jet engines developed today are much more complex than in the past. Generally speaking, turbojet engines make it possible to transform the chemical energy contained in a fuel into kinetic energy. Heinkel He-178 – Source: Wikimedia Commons The first civilian aircraft using jet engines appeared in the 1950s. The United States and the Soviet Union caught up at the end of the war, followed by France, previously held back by the German occupation. During the Second World War, the arms race accelerated the birth of modern aviation. However, the first flight was interrupted due to a bird sucked into the engine. The first jet aircraft was then the Heinkel He-178, used for combat. It was the German Hans Von Ohain who developed the first jet engine for the Heinkel Company in 1939. This new engine was more efficient and powerful than a piston engine.Įngland and Germany developed the first turbojet engines simultaneously. Instead of using a piston engine to compress the air, Whittle chose a downstream turbine that used the power provided by the exhaust gases to drive the compressor. Finally, following the work of the Romanian Henri Coandă and the Frenchman Maxime Guillaume in the 1930s, it was finally a British man, Sir Frank Whittle, who revolutionised air transport with turbojet propulsion. The development of the gas turbine was then delayed by the success of the steam turbine. However, Barber was unable to get his invention to work because the technology of the time did not generate sufficient power. His engine consisted of a compressor, a combustion chamber and a turbine, all powered by a flammable substance. In 1731, the Englishman John Barber began filing patents on an internal combustion gas turbine, the ancestor of the turbojet engine. The fact that these forces compensate keeps the airplane in the air. Newton’s law also explains how airplanes fly if the wing exerts a force on the air (its weight, the force that will make it go down), then the air exerts an opposite force on the wing, called the lift (upward). This force is called the thrust. In addition, the higher the speed of the propelled gases, the greater the thrust. Thus, the air ejected backwards exert an equal and opposite force on the aircraft by projecting it forwards. Jet propulsion is indeed based on this action-reaction principle, which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The one we are interested in is Newton’s third law, the principle of reciprocal actions. The first is the principle of inertia, the second is the principle of dynamics. In the 17th century, Newton enunciated three fundamental laws to explain motion. The plane moves and the air circulating on its wings makes it fly.Īirlines are constantly trying to improve the performance of combustion chambers to reduce aircraft emissions. The movement of the turbine thus causes the movement of the compressor and this allows the reaction to be continuous. Moreover, as the gases leave the engine, they turn a turbine, located on the same axis as the compressor, just after the combustion chamber. The gases come out at a very high speed because they pass through a reactor whose shape is shrinking. The induced reaction dilates the gases, which are then projected backwards by a nozzle, causing the aircraft to move forward. Air is sucked in by a blower it is continuously compressed before passing through a combustion chamber where it reacts with kerosene and ignites. The first jet engine, or turbojet engine, was designed by the Germans in 1939 however, it was the result of several centuries of research. About ten years later, the Wright brothers made the first controlled and motorized flights in history, in 1903. The Frenchman Clément Ader was the first to take off an airplane with a steam engine, inspired by a bat. In the 19th century, the industrial revolution allowed the development of many technical advances. The fundamental principles that would later help to understand how airplanes fly did not appear until the 17th and 18th centuries, with scientists such as Newton and Bernoulli. But at the time, the only known driving force was that of human muscles. Leonardo da Vinci developed the first concepts in the 16th century. Ever since the myth of Icarus, in which the hero made wings out of bird feathers and flew, humans have been trying to understand how certain species take flight in order to reproduce them with machines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |