Flight plan
A new design of aero-engine fan could make future aircraft more efficient by turning drag into thrust. Siobhan Wagner reports.
Aero-engine fans that are claimed to reduce fuel burn by 10 to 20 per cent by turning aircraft drag into thrust could be possible thanks to a new design from a
research team.
The fans, which would be embedded above aircraft wings, would remove the low velocity airflow from the upper surface of the airframe that is responsible for drag. This approach is called 'boundary layer ingestion' — the same technique used for torpedo propulsion. If it can be successfully developed it has the potential to reduce fuel consumption significantly.
The way aero-engine fans are designed now makes them unable to ingest boundary layer, which is a non-uniform flow.
'If you put a non-uniform flow into a fan it just shakes itself to bits and loses its efficiency,' said Chez Hall, the project's principal investigator. 'At the moment, jet engines are away from the aircraft and hang down on pylons. So they capture just clean flow coming in.'
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