GasProp: Reducing Blade Compressibility Effects Through Waste-Heat Recovery in Aircraft Engines

Abstract

Gas-turbine aircraft engines use a gas turbine to produce high-pressure hot gasses. The available internal energy of the hot gasses is then converted into jet kinetic energy through nozzles or extracted from a turbine to produce thrust by means of fans and/or propellers. Propulsive-efficiency requirements have resulted in the continuous increase of engine bypass/core ratios experienced by modern high-bypass-ratio turbofans, turboprops, and unducted fans or propfans [1]; whereas the improvement of the core-compression ratios allows to obtain thermodynamic efficiencies higher than 0.6.